Review: Smart Buildings in the Smart Grid

Dr. Qadeer ul Hassan1*,

1
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan

Abstract-
In the world of automation systems in the buildings and power networks both they are
connected to each other electrically but there is no data interaction between them. Two-way
seamless communication is the key aspect of realizing the vision of smart grid and Smart
building. With a specific end goal to accomplish the smart grid vision, we need to work more
rather than remote metering, coordinating services offered by the smart buildings into the smart
grid needs. There are several standardized wired and wireless communication technologies
available for various smart grid applications. Wireless technologies not only offer significant
benefits over wired, such as including low installation cost, rapid deployment, mobility, etc.,
but also more suitable for remote end applications. Buildings all around the globe consume a
lot of energy which is 33% of the primary energy resources and contribute towards 30% of the
total CO2 emission. In USA commercial and residential buildings consume round about 75%
of total electrical energy consumed in USA. The main objective of the paper is to look at the
current state of the art in smart grid communication technologies and to show an extensive and
huge research led on state of the art intelligent control systems for energy management in smart
energy buildings (SEB’s), including their social, economic, environmental and legislative
drivers.
Keywords:
Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD),
Smart Building, Communication Technologies, Smart Grid, Power Line Carriers (PLC), BACnet,
ZigBee, Wi-Fi, General packet radio service (GPRS), Global system for mobile (GSM).
Introduction
Smart grids are a direct response to the difficulties that traditional power grids need to confront.
Energy is used in buildings for heating and cooling, hot water, lighting and appliances, and most
of this energy come from the burning of fossil fuel, which amounted to 81.23% of global energy
consumption in 2011 [1]. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) [2], global
greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly increasing and it will be difficult to limit the long-term rise
in global average temperature to 2◦C below pre-industrial levels. Buildings’ share of CO2
emissions is higher in some countries; e.g., the sector represents 50% of the total of the CO2
emissions in the UK in2013 [3]. The building sector, therefore, plays a significant role in
mitigating the impacts of climate change – first, through reducing the demand; i.e. energy
conservation, and second, by maximizing the use of renewable energy – both aimed at reducing
GHG emissions [4]
Al around the world, the test of the developing energy demand in buildings is strange.
Buildings represent for more than 33% of total primary energy supply. The consumption of
electrical energy in building in different countries is shown in fig. 1.

60
53
50
Energy Consumption (%)

50
40 42 39 40 40
40 36
33 34 35
30
30
19
20

10

Fig.1.Building energy consumption in selected countries.

Communication network will play a significant role in the success of smart grids, and smart
buildings and cities. According to Depuru et al. [5], the selection of the communication network
and design of the communication devices are critical and must satisfy complex requirements. Each
country has normally outlined designed its own particular adaptation based on the previous
research that have emerge a great number of protocols related smart-grid-, as noted by EPRI
and NIST [6], [7].This paper also discussed the advantages and disadvantages of these widely
used communication and network technologies.

1. Communication and network technologies for smart building:

A communication system is the back bone of smart building. To enhance the intelligent and
smartness level of the building we must connect the building with advanced technologies and
application. These days, for most of the system mainly two channels are in used for this,
particularly power-line-communication (PLC) [12], [13] and wireless communication. These
technologies can be used for data transmission between utility meters and utility providers,
building energy management system and indoor environmental monitoring sensors, building users
and smart appliances. The communication infrastructure of smart buildings are shown in fig 2.
Both technologies (wired and wireless) have their advantages and disadvantages e.g., wireless
technologies are low-cost solutions as compared to the wired technologies, and have low
installation and operating costs. On the other hand, wired technologies are a more secure way of
data transfer as compared to the wireless technology. The choice of the technology depends on the
requirements of the problem.

Fig 2: Smart grid architecture increases the capacity and flexibility of the network and
provides advanced sensing and control through modern communications technologies
The designer of wireless sensor has to select the protocols from the available wireless protocols
like ZigBee, One Net, EnOcean, 6LoWPAN, etc., [14]. In many cases, a particular routing is
proposed to enable continuous operation [15]. In the below section, we will discuss some of the
widely used communication and networks technologies for metering and sensory purposes in the
buildings, integration challenges, control systems in the smart buildings and the drivers used for
energy metering and environmental monitoring.
1.1. ZigBee:

ZigBee was built on the IEE 802.15.4 standard and operates in the2.4 GHz and 900 MHz
bands [16], this standard defines the physical layer and medium access control sub-layer
specifications for allow rate and cost personal area networks. ZigBee supports the star,
tree and mesh networking topologies. ZigBee provides a low cost, reliable data transfer,
short range, low power consumption home area wireless network solution. ZigBee is
mostly used for security system, building automation and remote meter readings. ZigBee
has application limitations due to its low power and rate, and short-distance nature.
Therefore, it is not recommended to be used for the applications with strong real-time and
large amount of data [17].
1.2 Power line carriers:
Power line carriers (PLCs) uses existing electricity grid, cellular network, mesh network,
licensed and unlicensed radio, wireless modem, power line communication, RS-232/485,
WiMAX, Ethernet and Wi-Fi to upload data using IEC DNP. PLCs are more suitable for remote
locations, where cellular or GPRS coverage is not avail-able or where the number of consumers
are relatively low. The data transmission near electricity transmission can be problematic in PLC
as there is data distortion and in most cases, it is ideal to avoid transformer points. PLCs also have
low bandwidth (up to 20 Kbps) but the advantages of PLCs are that they have low running cost
and can be installed using current infrastructure, there also have low initial cost.
1.3 Modbus:
Modbus was introduced by Mod icon Corporation and used it as a point-to-point
connection with EIA-232C interfaces of Programmable logic controllers). It is one of the widely
used communication protocol due to its simplicity and reliability. It includes RTU (Remote
Terminal Unit), TCP (Transmission Control Proto-col) and ASCII mode of transmission and
supports RS-232, RS-422, RS-485 and Ethernet based equipment. Modbus is based on
Master/Slave method for data communication; an information request is sent by the Master and
Slave produces the response to the requested information. Modbus, because of its simplicity and
open source availability, is more popular for local communication in buildings and has become
standard for industrial SCADA systems. One of the primary concerns of Modbus is that it does not
support authentication nor encryption [18], which means it is less secure and more vulnerable to
cyber-attacks.
2. Integration challenges
2.1 Abstraction upon the network protocol:

There are a wide range of fieldbus territory conventions, correspondence conventions and
restrictive applications that must be disconnected consistently. This endeavor isn't new, since
it was at that point handled in the late 90s associating various fieldbus protocols to an IP
network by a three layered gateway [19]. In that case the bottom layer included fieldbus
protocols, the middle one the data model layer and the upper one give the IP connection. By
analogy, the right strategy seems to be mapping each of the protocols to the data model layer
obtained above.

2.2 Connection to the real-time middleware:

DPWS offers a specific set of functions (i.e. read or write a variable of a gadget) as in [20],
which converts the operations on that specific variable on internal service. Along these lines,
outer administrations are the aggregation of some of a few inward ones in the SOA jargon, the
arrangement in sequence and organization of them is called service orchestration. This third
upper layer will wrap the other two, associating with the DDS network as an OSGi1 real-time
service. This system will permit to play out the collection and coordination of administrations
both locally and remotely normally.

3. Control systems in buildings

The building control system (BCS), also known as building automation system (BAS) or
building management system (BMS), has in no uncertainty prompted the general particulars
of building checking and metering frameworks. The climatic conditions in the building is
monitor and control by these centralized, integrated, hardware and software networks. The
operational execution of the structures alongside the wellbeing and relief of the inhabitants is
typically guaranteed with these control frameworks.

3.1 Conventional controllers:

Building control networks are essential elements in building energy administration for
achieving energy productivity and manageability. The standard control schemes, such as a
non/off switching controller, i.e. thermostats, proportional–integral (PI) and proportional–
integral–derivative (PID), have been widely utilized as a part of building designing.

3.2 Intelligent controllers:

Various researches had done a lot of work on intelligent controllers in the 1990s. The
fundamental research drifts in the field of propel energy and relief management controls were
developed.(i) Learning based methods including artificial intelligence, fuzzy systems and
neural networks —fuzzy with conventional controls, adaptive fuzzy neural network (ANFIS)
systems, etc.;(ii) The model based predictive control (MPC) technique, which follows the
principles of the classical controls; and (iii) agent based control systems.

4. Drivers for energy metering and environmental monitoring

4.1 Mitigating climate change and enhancing energy efficiency:

In order to limit the projected global temperature rise to 20C, the IEA has proposed four emissions
reduction policy solutions, of which the policies related to specific energy efficiency measures
have been found to yield in greater savings – about 49% of the total emissions savings identified
in the World Energy Outlook 2013 report [21]. In Europe, energy efficiency within the overall
energy systems and infrastructure has been recognized as one of the five closely related and
mutually reinforcing dimensions of the EU Energy Union agenda, aimed at reducing energy
consumption to reduce pollution and preserve domestic energy sources. In recent years, the
overarching drive towards greater energy efficiency has resulted in renewed interests in heating
and cooling as distinct areas of focus, in recognition of their share (50%) in the European Union’s
final energy consumption. Electric and thermal smart energy grids with distributed and dynamic
generation, transmission and distribution of energy are increasingly being seen as essential for the
transition toward slow carbon energy systems [22].

4.2 Feedback on energy consumption and cost reduction:

Researchers have done an extensive amount of research on providing feedback to users on their
energy consumption and energy savings that can be achieved through feedback and it was
concluded that feedback can reduce energy consumption. Darby [23] has reviewed three types of
feedback for residential sector i.e. direct feedback (providing real-time meter readings), indirect
feed-back (billing) and inadvertent feedback (a by-product of technical, household or social
change). It was found that energy savings from direct and indirect feedback were in the range of
5–15% and 0–10%respectively. Therefore, metering solutions are better options for providing
feedback to occupants. We acknowledge that most of the studies conducted on providing feedback
and its effect on energy savings are performed on residential buildings, and fewer studies were
carried out on non-domestic buildings. Also, the impact of occupants behavior on energy
consumption in non-domestic buildings is less when compared to claimed 20% reduction in energy
use [24].

Conclusion:

The research about building automation, smart grids, sensor networks, and their coordination
is developed within the Industrial Electronics Society of IEEE. Recent developments in
building controls can be found in the zone of energy efficiency and adaptability of operation:
accessible information are better organized with the goal that current data is open in an
incorporated manner, which is a fundamental necessity for an indispensable point like energy
productivity. Communication and network technologies should be cost benefit and be able to
provide good transmittable range along with secured data transmission and better power
quantity and band-width. One of the biggest challenges of AMI is the protection of metering
data against unauthorized access. For the most part, worldwide building energy demand is at
40% and will soon touch 60% as per the statistics.
Choosing a proper metering and monitoring solution is a challenging task as it depends on
different factors such as granularity, accuracy, cost, availability, ease of deployment and
communication protocol.
References

[1] The World Bank, World Development Indicators 1960–2013, The World Bank, Washington,
DC, 2014.
[2] International Energy Agency, Redrawing the Energy Climate Map – World Energy Outlook
Special Report, 2013 http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/WEO Special
Report 2013 Redrawing the Energy Climate Map.pdf (accessed 01.10.15).
[3] DECC, 2013 UK Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Provisional Figures and 2012 UK Greenhouse
Gas Emissions, Final Figures by Fuel Type and End-User, Department of Energy and Climate
Change, London, UK, 2014.

[4] R.M. Dowd, M. Mourshed, Low carbon buildings: sensitivity of thermal properties of opaque
envelope construction and glazing, Energy Procedia 75(2015) 1284–1289,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2015.07.189.
[5] S.S.S.R. Depuru, L. Wang, V. Devabhaktuni, in: Smart meters for power grid: challenges,
issues, advantages and status, Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 15 (6) (2011) 2736–2742.
[6] Report to NIST on the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Roadmap, Electric Power
Research Institute (EPRI), 2009.

[7] NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, 1st ed., National
Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce, 2009, draft.

[8] A. Rauch, F. Klanner, R. Rasshofer, and K. Dietmayer, “Car2x-based perception in a high-

level fusion architecture for cooperative perception systems,” in Intelligent Vehicles
Symposium (IV), 2012 IEEE. IEEE, 2012, pp. 270–275.

[9] L. Hoehmann and A. Kummert, “Car2x-communication for vision based object detection,”
in Software, Telecommunications and Computer Networks (SoftCOM), 2010 International
Conference on. IEEE, 2010, pp. 290–294.

[10] T. M. Chiwewe and G. P. Hancke, “A distributed topology control technique for low
interference and energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks,” Industrial Informatics, IEEE
Transactions on, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 11–19, 2012.

[11] R. Elfrink, S. Matova, C. de Nooijer, M. Jambunathan, M. Goedbloed, J. van de

Molengraft, V. Pop, R. Vullers, M. Renaud, and R. van Schaijk, “Shock induced energy
harvesting with a MEMS harvester for automotive applications,” in Electron Devices Meeting
(IEDM), 2011 IEEE International. IEEE, 2011, pp. 29–5.
[12] T. M. Chiwewe and G. P. Hancke, “A distributed topology control technique for low
interference and energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks,” Industrial Informatics, IEEE
Transactions on, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 11–19, 2012.

[13] R. Elfrink, S. Matova, C. de Nooijer, M. Jambunathan, M. Goedbloed, J. van de

Molengraft, V. Pop, R. Vullers, M. Renaud, and R. van Schaijk, “Shock induced energy
harvesting with a MEMS harvester for automotive applications,” in Electron Devices Meeting
(IEDM), 2011 IEEE International. IEEE, 2011, pp. 29–5.

[14] J. Nieves, M. de Mues, A. Espinoza, and D. Rodriguez-Alvarez, “Harmonization of

semantic data models of electric data standards,” in Industrial Informatics (INDIN), 2011 9th
IEEE International Conference on july 2011, pp. 733 –738.

[15] International Standard IEC 62056-62 Electricity metering – Data exchange for meter
reading, tariff and load control. Part 62: Interface classes, 2nd ed., IEC, 2006.
[16] IEEE, Approved Draft Amendment to IEEE Standard for Information Technology
Telecommunications and information exchange between systems-PART 15.4: Wireless Medium
Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for Low-Rate Wireless Personal
Area Networks(LR-WPANs): Amendment to add alternate PHY (Amendment of IEEE
Std802.15.4), IEEE Approved Std P802.15.4a/D7, 2007, pp. 1–26.

[17] Q. Zhang, Y. Sun, Z. Cui, Application and analysis of ZigBee technology for smart grid, in:
International Conference on Computer and Information Application (ICCIA), 2010, pp. 171–
174.
[18] I. Modicon, Modicon ModBus Protocol Reference Guide, North Andover, Massachusetts,
1996, pp. 28–29.
[19] M. Lobashov and P. Palensky, “Bringing energy-related services to reality,” in In
Proceedings of the 2001 IEWT Internationale EnergiewirtschaftstagungTU Wien, february
2001, pp. 97–99.
[20] J. Lima, V. Gomes, J. Martins, and C. Lima, “A standard-based software infrastructure to
support power system protection in distributed energy systems,” in Technological Innovation
for Value Creation, ser. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, L.
Camarinha- Matos, E. Shahamatnia, and G. Nunes, Eds. Springer Boston, 2012, vol. 372, pp.
355–362.

[21] International Energy Agency, Redrawing the Energy Climate Map – World Energy Outlook
Special Report, 2013 http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/WEO Special
Report 2013 Redrawing the Energy Climate Map.pdf (accessed 01.10.15).
[22] B. Juul-Kristensen, Efficiency in Energy Supply, High Efficiency CHP and Heating/Cooling,
CA-EED, Brussels, BE, 2014.
[23] S. Darby, in: The effectiveness of feedback on energy consumption, a review for DEFRA of
the literature on metering, Billing Direct Disp. 486 (2006) 1–24.
[24] S. Junnila, in: The potential effect of end users on energy conservation in office buildings,
Facilities 25 (7/8) (2007) 329–339, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/02632770710753352.