Uso innovador de dispositivos TIC tradicionales para descubrir patrones de uso y mejorar la eficiencia energética en edificios de oficinas

• Matt Batey ^[1] ; Juan Pablo García ^[2]
  1. [1] Consultant Sustainable Business Models, Partner
  2. [2] Leantricity, Partner
• Localización: Lean architecture, lean urban planning: 5th European Conference on Energy Efficiency and Sustainability in Architecture and Planning : Donostia-San Sebastián, 7-9 Julio 2014 / Rufino Javier Hernández Minguillón (ed. lit.), Víctor Araújo Corral (ed. lit.), Raffaelina Loi (ed. lit.), 2014, ISBN 978-84-9082-003-2, págs. 63-72
• Idioma: español
• Títulos paralelos:
  • Innovative use of traditional ICT devices to uncover spaces’ usage patterns and improve energy efficiency in office buildings
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro
• Resumen

  • This paper explores an alternative conceptual approach to occupancy and utilization metering and tracking in existing office buildings with dense ICT equipment usage. Instead of improving building performance by expensive design, construction and renovation processes – the same output from an equal area of workspace using less energy in kWh/m2 – our focus is on increasing output using existing buildings, maximizing utilization through sharing, coordination of working hours from different people, and elimination of unused workspaces. When we think about spatial and occupancy studies, we generally imagine an expensive and complicated setup of detection devices that can capture the needed data. By the contrary, the subject of this study is a buildings’ spatial and occupational analysis based on insight derived from the utilization of a traditional PC Power Management tool with a repurposed goal. The information uncovered is the one found when working to power manage big networks of computers. The sudden realization that a network of computers is a network of sensors, reveals itself as a useful and inexpensive tool to detect behavior patterns, unused or abandoned offices spaces, and opportunities for energy savings with simple measures orbiting around moving people and sharing spaces. The goal of our research is to validate the usefulness (or lack off it) of activity data captured from users in offices’ computers to gain information on: occupancy numbers, frequently unused spaces that can be repurposed or shared, and activity from off working hours persons that ask for HVAC, lighting, security and space resources that could be perfectly improved by simple reallocations or movements inside organizations. We also plan to use this information as a real time input for BEMS and EMS that can ingest this data as a calculation relative to buildings occupancy hence improving building services configuration. This paper presents the results and their implications for the property industry of real world trials in buildings of 2 Catalonian cities, including Barcelona. Previous studies in the UK and Finland showed how actual desk use is only 45% of capacity during the working day. The results of the initial trials support this statistic in the Catalonian workplaces studied. Conventional methods of reducing energy use by including presence detection and zoning in building energy management systems offer a solution to energy waste, but they ask for big budgets and long implementation periods. The device-based method applied here offers significant potential advantages over conventional sensor based energy optimization approaches. It is substantially cheaper to implement because it ‘senses’ presence or activity using existing technology of employees’ devices. Perhaps more significantly, optimization is based on an understanding of actual working practices and specific needs of employees, rather than reacting impersonally to aspects of their behavior - e.g. presence or movement detection. This allows users to feed their views into the optimization process and have it suit their preferences, removing the barrier of having to adjust to a new technology which they may not fully understand. The capacity to assess each user’s situation separately offers a ‘third way’ of partial or phased flexibility, applied only to those it suits or helps. The sustainability implications of working to this model relate to the potential for a reduction in total workspace demand and a resulting drop in energy and resource use. Further research is required to explore new business models for sharing space, service and maintenance costs, to ensure the workspace made free by optimization can be used in place of additional new-build.