Markus Groissböck

Optimizing Building Energy Operations via Dynamic Zonal Temperature Settings

Deregulation of the energy sector has created new markets for producers as well as opportunities for consumers to meet their needs in a more customized way. Yet, traditional building energy management systems operate statically by adjusting air or water flow in heating and cooling systems in response to predetermined triggers, in relation to large deviations in the zone temperature from the equipment’s set-point temperature. The writers provide decision support to managers of buildings through dynamic control of the installed equipment that seeks to minimize energy costs. Assuming that the building’s occupants have comfort preferences expressed by upper and lower limits for the temperature, the writers model the effect of active equipment control (through changes to either the set point or valve flow) on the zone temperature, taking into account the external temperature, solar gains, building’s shell, and internal loads. The energy required to change the zone temperature in each time period is then used to calculate the energy cost in the objective function of an optimization problem. By implementing the model for actual public buildings, the writers demonstrate the advantages of more active equipment-management in terms of lower costs and energy consumption.

Encouraging Combined Heat and Power in California Buildings

Encouraging Combined Heat and Power in California Buildings Michael Stadler, Markus Groissbock, Goncalo Cardoso, Andreas Muller, Judy Lai Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory February 2013

Supporting Energy Efficiency Decisions with IT: Initial Experiences from the EnRiMa Project

IT solutions can aid decision makers in making informed decisions that lower the energy consumption in buildings. However, in order to design and implement an IT solution there are a number of issues that need to be resolved, for example, adequately handling sometimes contradicting goals of the decision makers and integrating the Decision Support System with the existing building IT infrastructure in the form of building management systems. In this paper we report on our initial experiences from implementing a decision support system for the management of energy consumption in public buildings. The experiences are based on our work with the EnRiMa project that aims to develop a state-of art decision support system for lowering the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of public buildings. We divide our experiences into two areas, namely, business concerns and software architectural, and provide our initial solutions and lessons learned with respect to these areas. Furthermore, we discuss a number of challenges for future work in the area of IT support for energy efficiency.