12.10.14
Data-driven research into public sector energy reduction
Source: Public Sector Executive Oct/Nov 2014
Dr Nigel Goddard, director of the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, is to lead a team of researchers who will investigate various ways of reducing energy consumption in public sector buildings.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh are to investigate the interactions between energy technologies and the behaviours of building managers and occupants of public sector buildings.
The aim is to create a ‘feedback loop’ that provides information to building managers and occupants not just on their energy consumption, but on what activities are using energy, and how much for each, plus suggestions on cutting energy use.
Dr Nigel Goddard, director of the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, will lead the ‘Data-Driven Sociotechnical Energy Management in Public Sector Buildings’ project.
He told PSE: “We’re trying to find ways to help reduce energy use in various kinds of buildings in the public sector, and a lot of these building types have counterparts in the private sector – so the lessons we learn will carry over.”
The project – a collaboration between the university’s informatics, architecture, and social and political science schools – has secured almost £500,000 from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
Using an interdisciplinary conceptual framework, the team of computer scientists, architects and sociologists will explore the behavioural interactions. Dr Goddard said: “We want to use advanced machine learning methods to analyse the data of current energy management systems and to feed back to the various categories of people associated with the building information and advice about how energy is being used.
“It is one of the strange things about energy – over the last 100 years it has become fairly invisible. It used to be the case that you would have to go out and chop the wood, and then after that you would have to carry the coal, and it was fairly obvious to people when they were using energy.
“Now it just comes out of a wire or pipe and we don’t even know when we’re using it. The idea is to try to make that more visible and give advice.”
Living Labs
The ‘feedback loop’ will also be used in creating new automated controls for building energy systems, which the researchers will construct and evaluate within Edinburgh’s council and university buildings – offices, labs, libraries, schools and community centres – over the two-and-a-half year study period.
According to Dr Goddard, the systems and concepts will be explored in ‘Living Labs’ in the buildings and will provide the managers and users with a wealth of information that they can use to reduce their energy expenditure.
“The ‘Living Lab’ involves using the people who will use the technology in the design and development stages, so it is a very iterative process where you take on their ideas, ask what they think and how they would use it,” he said.
“This is rather than just putting a system in place and expecting people to use it. With the ‘Living Lab’ you, in effect, co-create the solution.
“We have some potential ideas about the type of systems and controls to potentially develop, but they are very tentative. The obvious ones are to do with heating and cooling systems because, typically, they are the biggest energy users. But it is very much going to depend on which buildings we work in and what kind of systems they have.”
The project was meant to start on 1 September 2014, but it is now expected to start in March or April 2015. In the lead-up to the new start date, the researchers will work with the council and University of Edinburgh to pick the precise buildings to use in the study.
“That will include discussing what kind of building energy management systems are already in place, and whether we can interface to them,” said Dr Goddard. “And when it comes to control, there are a lot of potential complexities we have to think about – not in terms of the technologies, but regulation.
“For example, there are regulations around how cold it can be in buildings and the people who are managing the building will want to make sure the control we might put in is not going to interfere, or potentially subject them to issues with regards to meeting those regulations.”
Dr Goddard and his colleagues hope the project will highlight cost-effective and commercially viable ways to cut energy demand in public sector buildings.
“If we can demonstrate enough of a reduction compared to the cost of putting the systems in, then there is potentially a business opportunity for energy suppliers or building management people, who could take what we’ve learned and build it up,” he said. “In terms of the academic impact, this type of work will help transform social science, especially as there is a burgeoning interest in developing data-driven methods.”
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