Technology and Innovation Management

IV Literature review

About a third of the electricity consumed in the EU is consumed by households, while the use of energy in non-household buildings is also high (European Commission DG INFSO, 2008). Therefore, the reduction of energy consumption or more efficient energy consumption can lead to a consistent cut in energy consumption and, thus, in natural resources (European Commission DG INFSO, 2008).

Today, researchers recommend focusing on developing the effective energy management of smart buildings (Kraft & Kameniecky, 2009). Smart building solutions can centralize and correlate data from building systems, corporate data warehouses, and external sources, such as utilities and weather data feeds. Building engineers can find anomalies and manage energy use holistically (Kraft & Kameniecky, 2009). Likewise, employees can be encouraged to save energy through information sharing in the form of dashboards and energy benchmarks that create internal competition (Kraft & Kameniecky, 2009).

Another concern is the fault identification to reveal malfunctioning systems and systems that consume an excessive amount of energy. Through sophisticated fault detection and diagnosis rules, issues with building equipment across an entire real estate portfolio can be automatically identified and prioritized for building engineers (Kraft & Kameniecky, 2009). Conducting equipment maintenance continuously – so-called continuous commissioning – avoids waste and dramatically improves resource allocation (Kraft & Kameniecky, 2009). Engineers do not have to walk around looking for issues, and money is spent where it is most needed. This also frees up engineers’ time to address issues with smaller subsystems, adding up to a large potential savings opportunity (Kraft & Kameniecky, 2009).

Prioritizing notifications made by building systems can help to optimize the energy consumption by buildings. By prioritizing and structuring the numerous notifications generated by building systems, a smart building solution focuses on engineers’ attention on the most critical events (Kraft & Kameniecky, 2009). They can concentrate on urgent and impactful (Kraft & Kameniecky, 2009).

Furthermore, some researchers (Asdrubali, 2013) suggest using new technologies to decrease buildings’ energy consumption. For instance, a cool roof system is one of such solutions. A cool roof is a roof system characterized by high albedo properties, that make it able to reflect the solar radiation incident on its surface, combined to an as much high infrared emissivity, that allows the roof to emit the maximum quote of solar radiation previously absorbed, through thermal radiation (Asdrubali, 2013). Such a roof system allows achieving several energy‐environmental benefits, both direct effects on the building energy balance, and indirect effects, at the urban scale and in terms of global climate (Asdrubali, 2013).

Another technological innovation that can save energy is a new lighting system and devices. For instance, Tubular Daylighting Devices (TDDs) use modern technology to transmit visible light through opaque walls and roofs (Asdrubali, 2013). The tube itself is a passive component consisting of either a simple reflective interior coating or a light-conducting fibre optic bundle (Asdrubali, 2013). It is frequently capped with a transparent, roof‐mounted dome ‘light collector’ and terminated with a diffuser assembly that admits the daylight into interior spaces. It distributes the available light energy evenly (or else efficiently if the lit space’s use is reasonably fixed, and the user desired one or more ‘bright‐spots’) (Asdrubali, 2013).