Information and Communications Technology based solutions in achieving building energy efficiency

Sophisticated and detailed building simulation tools are more commonly used by both architects and engineers in design process in hope to improve building energy efficiency. While building physics models being well developed and evolved in the past four decades, a surprisingly large and unexpected performance gap between the design intent and the actual operation continues to be observed and unsolved. Unaccounted dynamic occupant behavior in design stage is believed to be one of the significant contributing factors. On the other hand, the emerging and economic Information and Communications Technology (ICT) based sensing network has been showing great potential in better capturing occupant behavior dynamics during building operation. This paper introduces one ICT based solution - Personal Office Energy Monitor (POEM) developed by Intel Labs. Our preliminary results have shown POEM could be a promising noninvasive way of sensing real-time occupancy and informing the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system control for better operational energy efficiency. And a large scale of POEM deployments will result in a representative sample of occupancy profile in today's office environment, which researchers could use to develop a new occupancy profile for building design that reflect the actual office space utilization rate in today's organizational structure and flexible work arrangement and eventually lead to a more efficient building design.