Energy Efficient Homes

As part of community climate change commitments, many municipalities are incentivizing homeowners to adopt energy efficiency solutions to reduce energy and greenhouse gas emissions. Tracking the corresponding energy/GHG reductions is required to measure the effectiveness of municipal targets.

The planning and program development for energy efficient housing is unlocked by community energy planning (i.e. smart grids, district energy), building retrofits and upgrades for existing homes, and connected building automation systems for energy optimization. These technologies enable communities to achieve energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Planning energy efficient homes can be achieved by lowering the electricity, heating, and water needs of individual homes through passive design strategies (i.e. increased insulation, triple-glazed windows, air tightness testing of envelopes, etc.) and choice of building systems (i.e. waste-heat recovery pumps, high-energy efficiency furnace, evaporative coolers, etc.).

Opportunities to improve energy efficiency of existing homes requires in-depth energy audits, building energy modelling, and automating buildings using sensors to track occupancy needs.

Applications and Solutions: Energy Modelling & Demand Management

Energy modelling ensures that building design will meet performance requirements. At the community scale, district energy and active demand management are being made possible by live-data insights unlocked by smart grids. Existing buildings benefit from energy retrofits that use smart technologies that record real-time utility data using built-in sensors, meters, and connected devices to improve real-time demand management.

Technologies

Passive design strategies – This principle improves the energy efficiency in the design of buildings used to optimize solar gains for heating and lighting through thermal windows, reduce heat loss through insulation, reduce cooling through improved ventilation strategies.

Ground source and electric heat pumps – Energy systems that are designed to recover heat from other sources can offset the demand needs in buildings. Smart thermostats – IoT enabled thermostats that allow homeowners to adjust temperature setpoints when they are away from home.

Smart meters – Energy meters that monitor home energy consumption and are connected with utility networks to enable time-of-use pricing. Third party applications – Utility-based energy tracking applications offer multiple parties access to homeowner data for data gathering, marketing, disclosure, and system planning purposes.

Building sensors – Uses passive infrared, LiDAR, and cameras to detect the presence of occupants and if BAS enabled, can adjust the heating, cooling, and ventilation setpoints when a building is unoccupied.

Integrated Building Automation Systems (BAS) – Combines operational control of heating, cooling, lighting, ventilation, and home security systems to manage energy systems and home technologies. This relies on sensors, energy meters, and wi-fi enabled devices to be coordinated through an application interface.

District Energy – Distributed system that uses excess heat gains from sewer heat, industrial production, or cold lake water for example, to transfer heating and cooling to connected buildings. This reduces the need to produce new energy through renewable and non-renewable sources to meet building demands.

Smart Grids – Networked electricity operation that integrates all buildings in the grid to use real-time data to manage demand and supply by reducing grid losses, integrating renewable energy, optimizing energy storage, enabling electric vehicles, improving efficiency and reliability of electricity.1 Software interface unifying IoTs – Integrates energy sub-systems to enable rule setting and automated controls by creating holistic dashboard that links home IoTs with utility data and service bills (e.g. sewage, water, electricity, heating, road maintenance schedules etc.). Linking sensors with bills and applications provides for a harmonized experience, reducing user pain-points by providing a single, unified interface for master control.

Managing Liability Issues

Privacy

Issues.

⚠️ Consider the level of detail personal information is being collected and shared. Utility data is not personal unless it is linked with personal information such as home address or customer information.

Managing issues.

✅ De-identification of data and aggregating energy data prior to sharing with different agencies will help protect privacy.

✅ Collect data, don’t surveil homes. Collect samples of data that can be used to inform efficiency solutions rather than ongoing collection that can reveal personal activities and may be considered energy surveillance.

✅ Choose the technology appropriate to the task. Low-tech solutions such passive technologies may be preferable to high tech post-construction solutions that are less effective and more privacy invasive.

✅ Data-fuzzing. Employ data-fuzzing techniques to preserve privacy. For example, do not include start and end points in route data so that a particular route cannot be traced to an individual. Similarly, fuzzing data of sensitive areas provides an additional layer of security for personal information.

✅ De-identify at the source. Many camera technologies allow for faces to be blurred at collection.

✅ De-identify as soon as possible. If personal information absolutely must be collected, it should be stripped away as soon as possible.

✅ Limit data collection to only that which is needed. Collection strategies such as bicycle numbers and heat maps rather than individual-specific routes avoid engaging more serious privacy concerns.

✅ Ensure that partners or contractors follow collection restrictions. When purchasing data from private companies, ensure that they are upholding their own privacy obligations under relevant legislation.

✅ Follow good privacy practices.

Security

Issues.

⚠️ Primary issues with energy efficiency technologies are impacted by scale. The security concerns and threats to a smart grid system are of a different level than the threats posed by a software application collecting data. The relevant question is whether an adversary could hack the system to interfere with delivering energy reliably.

Managing issues.

✅ Security breaches against essential technologies can result in physical harm to an individual and requires thorough risk assessment.

✅ Follow good security practices.

Procurement

Issues.

⚠️ Compatibility and synchronicity across hardware and software systems is a critical liability risk because the effectiveness of smart systems relies upon coordinating functions.

Managing issues.

✅ Linking sensors, monitors, and energy consumption information to optimize performance is envisioned as the ideal in theory. But introduces contractual, privacy, security and safety risks when examining building systems at an ecosystem level.

✅ Follow sound procurement practices.

Operations

Issues.

⚠️ Safety considerations on the efficacy of new technologies requires proving it performs to code. If safety and performance are not thoroughly tested they can endanger safety, result in property damage, and compromise the reliability of other building systems.

Managing issues.

✅ Developing metrics and easing file sharing restrictions can benefit the end user and produce better outcomes.

Resources

Urban Hub, Smart synergies: improving the connection between smart homes and smart cities, (2019) - An overview of the interaction between smart homes and smart cities.