The impact of ICT for energy-efficient buildings

The built environment is responsible for a large part of the energy consumption in Europe and around 30 per cent of its carbon emissions. Alain Zarli, REEB Project Coordinator explains how the use of intelligent systems is crucial in ushering in a new era of sustainable ‘smart’ buildings..

Imagine a future in which your house is no longer simply a passive construction of bricks and mortar but a ‘smart’ building operating as an active node in a dynamic energy grid, producing and storing its own electricity to share with other buildings in the neighbourhood. Intelligent systems supervise your building’s power needs and communicate with energy service providers to control heating, cooling, lighting and hot water systems, and optimise the overall management of energy sources and loads at district level. They provide real-time, user-friendly information on how much energy is consumed by each appliance in your home, empowering you to take decisions that lead to energy savings.

New upcoming generations of smart meters will enable you to sell the renewable energy your building produces back into the grid or to share it with other buildings in your district through ICT-based neighbourhood management systems. This kind of energy balancing between buildings not only smoothes peaks in demand and ensures a more secure energy supply, but has also led to a radical shake up of the entire energy market, with new types of business models having emerged, driven by these energy-efficient smart buildings.

That’s the vision of many key researchers and industrial stakeholders in Europe so as to hit the EU’s ambitious target of reducing carbon emissions in the EU by 20 per cent by 2020. Key to achieving this goal is making buildings much more sustainable; in Europe, between 40 and 50 per cent of the energy we generate goes into heating buildings and providing power, accounting for around 30 per cent of carbon emissions.

Making tomorrow’s buildings energy positive – broadly defined as buildings which consume less energy than they produce over the course of a year – is vital to Europe’s low carbon strategy, says Alain Zarli, head of Innovation & Services Engineering Division at France’s Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment. He’s the coordinator for REEB (the European Strategic Research Roadmap to ICT-enabled Energy Efficiency in Building and Construction), a 30 month project launched with 1,249,867 Euros of EU funding in May 2008.

The two and a half year project is aimed at stimulating the innovative use of information and communications technology to support energy efficiency strategies because it is clear that this is the only way to achieve the smart buildings of the future.

An opportunity and a challenge

Studies show that 80 per cent of a building’s energy use occurs during its occupation (manufacture and erection account for less than 16 per cent) and that 80 per cent of a building’s lifetime energy consumption is influenced by its design, with user behaviour influencing just 20 per cent. This presents an enormous opportunity but also a huge challenge, says Alain Zarli, not least because at present the building sector’s main focus is upon initial construction costs rather than whole life performance. Added to this is the fact that building components, such as glass, and systems such as heating and lighting, are developed and installed independently, rather than in an integrated fashion, leading to significant system-level inefficiencies.

No wonder Antti Peltomäki, the European Commission’s deputy director-general for information, society and media, says: “Today, most of those who are charged with implementing energy efficient solutions are flying blind”. That’s why REEB was launched to coordinate and rationalise European research and development in this area and, crucially, to develop a European-wide agreed vision to accelerate the use of such technologies.

The consortium, which comprises eight partners, including three from industry, from France, Finland, Spain, Ireland, the UK and Germany, has spent the last two years identifying the main challenges standing in the way of more sustainable and energy efficient facilities and buildings, and getting common agreement among experts from the construction, ICT and energy sectors as to the solutions.

“A key finding is that, while there is an emerging consensus about the key RTD issues in ICT-enabled energy efficiency of buildings, the potential impact of various technologies is not sufficiently well known,” he says. “Therefore it is difficult to assess the relative importance of specific technologies, applications and systems, and it is necessary to develop a more holistic understanding of the potential effects of ICT on the energy efficiency of buildings.”

Three-stage vision

As part of that more holistic understanding, REEB has come up with a three-stage vision for the impact of ICT on energy-efficiency in buildings. In the short-term, ICT will enable buildings to meet the increasing demands of environmentally-aware users and of tighter energy efficiency regulations.

In the medium term, it will allow the energy performance of buildings to be optimised for the whole life cycle, and in the long-term, it will lead to a radical transformation of the energy market, with new business models emerging, driven by energy-efficient ‘prosumer’ buildings at district level.

It has set out the strategy for achieving this vision in a detailed roadmap which it published earlier this year in a public document – REEB (2010) – D4.2 Strategic Research Roadmap for ICT supported Energy Efficiency in Construction. The roadmap covers energy efficiency design and planning; intelligent and integrated control systems; user awareness & decision support; energy management & trading; and integration technologies. For example, intelligent and integrated control systems are an essential element of the energy efficient building of the future.

Several self-diagnosis systems already exist for heating, lighting and hot water, and some sensors can also monitor their own functioning and communicate when they detect an error. But at present the communication protocols market is crowded with many coexisting open or proprietary standards, which is why REEB has identified the establishment of a common shared standard as crucial in the medium term to enable the widespread development and adoption of intelligent systems. REEB has also identified several opportunities for ICT-enabled energy efficiency tools. These include:

• ICT methods and tools supporting optimal design of products and services with respect to energy consumption and related environmental impacts;

• Integrated ICT-based systems enabling an eco-efficient production, conservation and distribution of energy;

• New ICT-based control and monitoring systems for all types and ages of buildings;

• The design, simulation, evaluation and strategy adaptation of energy use profiles.

“REEB is a milestone in identifying, synthesising, and prioritising a comprehensive set of agreed main problems, challenges and prescribed research and technology development for new ICT-based solutions related to the future delivery of energy efficient facilities and buildings, at European level and worldwide,” says Alain Zarli. “In addition, it will support the achievement of Europe’s objective to save 20 per cent of energy consumption by 2020”.

Dr Alain ZARLI is CSTB project manager and Head of the "Innovation and Services Engineering" Division within the "Information Technologies and Knowledge Dissemination" department. His main fields of interest are programming languages and compilation, product modelling, rule-based languages and knowledge-based systems, distributed architectures, and software components, and technologies for smart constructions.

For further information, please visit http://www.ict-reeb.eu.

Published: Wednesday, 4th August 2010 by Adelle Kehoe