Enhancing Building Monitoring and Control for District Energy Systems: Technology Selection and Installation within the Living Lab Energy Campus

Abstract

With regard to climate change, it is imperative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One solution approach is to increase energy efficiency in buildings. Buildings contribute a high share of the total global energy usage. As the rate of new building constructions is low, measures applicable to existing buildings become paramount. Before applying new approaches on a large scale, it is necessary to evaluate them in a representative, realistic environment. Living labs such as the Living Lab Energy Campus (LLEC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) facilitate innovative monitoring and control approaches in a real-world setting. In this work, we investigate the required steps for bringing sensor and control networks, comprising more than 1800 devices, into 18 existing and new buildings. This enables both room-level monitoring and control, as well as the integration of building-wide automation. By introducing an ICT infrastructure, we pave the way towards holistic approaches on a district level. We describe the workflows used for selected instrumentation variants and show first insights from the operation of the resulting infrastructure. We show that the investigated instrumentation variants exhibit similar characteristics; however, they affect control behavior differently. We emphasize that instrumentation should be planned in the context of existing infrastructure. Moreover, we present and evaluate sample measurements obtained from different buildings.