16 Advanced Building Controls Akshata Atre and Ben Taube Technology Overview Distributed digital sensors and controls for temperature, humidity, CO2, occupancy, and other factors can reduce energy use in buildings by calibrating the heating, cooling, and ventilation of spaces to match measured occupant levels. Instead of heating and cooling entire buildings or building stories to predetermined setpoints, these controls enable us to turn mechanical systems on or off on a more detailed zone-by-zone, or even room-by-room, basis, depending on actual use patterns. Refining scheduled setpoint and setback temperatures can provide significant energy savings and improve thermal comfort while ensuring that spaces are being conditioned properly (Papadopoulos, 2019) alongside energy savings from providing fresh air only when it is necessary. Technology to implement advanced building controls is already commercially available in both off-the-shelf and customizable configurations. The main challenges to deploy such controls across MIT’s campus are careful, long-term planning to minimize disruption to institutional activities during the installation process as well as data security concerns. Fortunately, given that these types of controls and systems have been in wide use for a long time, there is no need for MIT to conduct preparatory research on whether they work and/or are effective. To fully benefit from this technology and reduce installation costs, better coordination is required to ensure advanced controls are part of all building retrofit projects, reducing installation costs. In residential construction, modern controls typically pay for themselves in less than one year. These numbers do not translate directly to commercial buildings since building management system (BMS) enabled sensors can be an order of magnitude more expensive than residential smart thermostats. However, switching to wireless controls can save on costs significantly, and once advanced controls are in place, there are significant opportunities for MIT researchers to innovate. In fact, MIT is currently conducting a study on AI-based controls in select classrooms which shows that innovative control strategies increase savings without any additional hardware costs (MIT News). Evolving sensing technologies such as those currently being developed at the Media Lab (“Responsive Environments Group”) could also reach their full potential if tested at the campus level, contributing to fundamental research while saving on-site carbon. Advanced digital controls can also be used for lighting and other building energy end uses to further reduce campus carbon emissions. Risk and Innovation High resolution temperature controls are a very low-risk technology that will greatly benefit the campus’s decarbonization efforts. The technology is widely available, and the potential cost and carbon savings are worth the effort of implementation. Indeed, MIT faces a reputational risk if it continues utilizing existing mechanical controls, which are outdated and energy-intensive while other peer institutions such as Stanford (de Chalendar, 2023, Hu, 2023) take steps to modernize and optimize HVAC. MIT will also likely incur undue operational costs, unnecessarily conditioning unoccupied and unused buildings as seen in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic when energy
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