Tag Archives: energy in time

smart buildings

Why smart buildings are beneficial?

Smart, or smartly designed buildings are not only a trend but a real need to use all available resources at hand to improve the living standards and contribute to create and maintain a sustainable place to live in, that is, in a smart living city.

Buildings in different countries must be designed according to the local climate in order to obtain the maximum of benefits for energy saving. For example, Punjab, India, proposed a practical approach for the new buildings’ design to use all the possible daylight for energy balance both in summer and winter.

What started with a declaration in 2001 known as Energy Conservation Act in Punjab, has turned recently into a law obliging all new buildings with a connected load of 100 kilowatt and more to follow a power-saving code through which it will be possible to reduce energy consumption by up to 40%. The code applies to all buildings with an air-conditioned area of 500 square meters, besides to complexes, group houses, offices, hotels, shopping zones, and private hospitals. According to Punjab Energy Development Agency (Peda), the code covers the following aspects: building aesthetics, envelope, mechanical system, the equipments for heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning, interior and exterior lighting, and hot-water service, besides electrical power and motors for thermal comfort in non-central-AC buildings.

These actions pretend to involve different professionals related to construction and urban management, for instance, chief architects, chief town planners, local bodies, and agencies involved in clearing construction projects in urban centers. Of course, modern technologies are needed to drive towards sustainable urban energy systems.

This is also a valuable contribution to the environment protection since this practice allows to reduce notoriously greenhouse gases emissions. Actually, energy inefficient constructions are highly responsible for such emissions, according to IEA. Between now and 2050 a large portion of new buildings – equivalent to 40% of the world’s current building stock – will be built in cities in emerging and developing economies. The situation regarding inefficient buildings already constructed and the projection of new ones must be checked urgently if we want to prioritize the climate change – a hard but possible task, although many governments must cooperate and unite their efforts to promote serious regulations regarding new constructions and maintenance of old ones. This will revert positively in living conditions, safety, economic growth, just naming a few.

Sources:

New building code to save ‘40% power’ coming up in Punjab.

Make building standards top priority for tackling climate change.

Energy Technology Perspectives 2016.

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The European Union’s new strategy on heating and cooling explores the potential of natural cooling methods

On February 16, 2016, the European Commission announced a new initiative in its community strategy on issues such as heating and cooling systems inside buildings.  The objective is to propel and accelerate the renovation of these new mechanisms.  For this, a list of natural cooling methods has been created that present great opportunities for energy saving.

The European Commission presented the first strategy for heating and cooling elements never before approached in the European Union.  The initiative’s objective is to create the most intelligent, most energy efficient and sustainable heating and cooling systems in buildings and the industry ever.  This may represent a great opportunity for the industry of natural cooling methods, as Europe wants to free its stock of community buildings from carbon derived elements by the year 2050.

90% of houses in the European Union are currently inefficient energy-wise.  This is easily understood as half the building stocks in existence were built before there were community regulations on this issue, and Europe has a building refitting rhythm that does not even reach 1%.

To prepare the transition toward low carbon consumption heating and cooling, the European Commission will review the Directive on energy efficiency, the directive on energy efficiency in buildings, and the initiative of intelligent financing for smart buildings launched in 2016.

For more information click here.

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UGR, member of the EiT project, develops an extension for Building Information Models that supports imprecise knowledge management

The Building Information Model (BIM) is a three-dimensional representation of the conceptual elements of a building –floors, walls, windows, etc.–, their properties, and the relations among them. The BIM has become a key tool to achieve successful communication between the agents involved in the building life-cycle (architects, contractors, owners, facility managers, etc.), since it provides a visual and centralized information repository. Open standards for encoding BIM data, such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), have contributed to expand its adoption, but they have limited capabilities for cross-domain information integration and query.

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To address these challenges, the Linked Building Data initiative promotes the use of Semantic Web technologies in order to create more interoperable BIMs. The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which the contents of documents are described with computable languages; for example, we can explicitly represent that “Don Quijote” is a “novel” (a kind of “book”), and that it is authored by “Miguel de Cervantes”. These data resources can be linked in a similar fashion as we do with documents in the web; for example, we can say that our “Don Quijote” is the same resource explained in the Wikipedia entry for “Don Quijote de la Mancha”.  Such knowledge representations are called ontologies.

Based on their previous research work on the management of imprecise information in ontologies, the UGR research team participating in the Energy IN TIME project has proposed an extension of the semantic BIM that allows: (a) using natural language terms to describe building elements, such as ‘big’, ‘similar’, or ‘near’; and (b) querying the system in these same terms to retrieve, for instance, all the elements with size around a dimension value, or those that have been built with similar materials. This approach is based on Fuzzy Logic, a mathematical framework that allows machines to process statements that hold to a degree in the [0, 1] interval rather than being completely true or false, like in “the window is small with degree 0.8” (which means that the window can be considered quite small).

Specifically, the UGR team has created an expressive fuzzy ontology language to expand the capabilities of the Semantic Web version of the IFC standard, and has documented how to use a fuzzy reasoning engine in a BIM context with selected examples. This reasoning engine, named DeLorean (DEscription LOgic REasoner with vAgueNess), has been developed in collaboration with researchers of the University of Zaragoza. The resulting fuzzy semantic BIM enables new functionalities in the building design and analysis stages —namely, soft integration of cross-domain knowledge, flexible BIM query, and imprecise parametric modelling.

More information.

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The Swedish Energy Agency has just begun the “Intelligent Energy Management Challenge” in NineSights.com

The main purpose of the Challenge is to find innovative solutions that manage the energy infrastructure of a building with the objective to increase the self consumption of solar energy produced in a building.

 

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A maximum of 4 participants will be awarded € 10,000, alongside with the opportunity to discuss with the local energy authorities in order to create pilot spaces where it will be able to test the results of the project.

If the pilot project inspires interest in other regions, it will be awarded up to € 50,000 for each municipality. Successful pilot projects can result in supplier negotiations for up to € 2.800.000 with the participating Swedish Municipalities for 2016-2020.

This project emerges after the worldwide fall in prices of solar cells, which has brought the use of this technology from specialized enterprises to the final consumer, who is able to produce and consume his/her own energy.

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Thus, participants are asked to create innovative pilot projects which are capable to be implemented in a domestic environment, to reduce the homes reliance on the main electrical network and to encourage self-consumption in a simple and friendly way. It will be specially valued the project’s capacity to provide diverse energy benefits to its users, as well as a flexibility that may allow to increase the project’s capacity or to establish further uses.

This competition is an excellent opportunity to promote the collaboration between public entities in order to encourage new energy efficiency policies in Sweden

 

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