The ZUB office building (Centre for Environmentally Conscious Building) was designed in 2001 with the purpose of testing low-energy and carbon technologies. With the building having primarily heating demands, the design annual heating demand was estimated to be less than 20 kWh/m². Energy demand in operation was 16.5 kWh/m², achieving the best possible rating according to the German Energy code “Wärmeschutzverordnung 95”.

The energy concept of the building included construction with very low U-value, triple glazed windows and design to use natural lighting and natural ventilation. Solar gains meet most heating demands through the south-facing façade. When additional heating is required, this is delivered through a communal district heating network. Cooling demands are met by a ground-source heat pump placed under the ZUB basement. As the building is air-tight, an 80% mechanical ventilation with heat recovery system is used.

The characteristic that defines the building is the high inertial behaviour due to the weight of the building walls and the massive radiant systems installed to deliver heating and cooling. These types of high thermal mass slabs allow water supply temperatures close to the internal ambient temperatures, i.e. use of low water temperatures during the heating season and relatively high water temperatures during the cooling period. Combining these strategies leads to reduced energy consumption by maximising the exergetic use of the climate control systems.

The LBNL Office Building (i.e. Building 59 or Wang Hall) is a medium-sized office building located inside the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) campus in Berkeley, California. The building has 10,400 m² of conditioned spaces on four floors. The lower level provides space for mechanical systems, the second level is the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and the third and fourth levels are office spaces. The ground office floor (third floor) is primarily closed office space, while the second office floor (fourth floor) is primarily open office space. The building was built in 2015 and retrofitted in 2019 to improve its energy efficiency. Model predictive control (MPC) technology was implemented in the building automation system (BAS) to optimize HVAC operations (supply air temperature setpoint, air damper position, fan speed, hot water valve position) for saving energy.

The OMV headquarter is an existing building located in Viertel Zwei in Vienna (Austria). It consists of two wings – an 80-meter-high tower (the so-called “Hoch Zwei”) and a lower rise cuboidal volume (known as “Plus Zwei”) linked by a glass bridge. The head office currently consists of open space offices both in the Hoch Zwei and Plus Zwei buildings, while the Plus Zwei building also houses the employee restaurant, the occupational health centre, the post office and the copy centre. 

This building is in one of the city’s main intersections (Saint-Catherine St and Guy St), exposed to a large population moving around and through the building. It has two parts: the Engineering Computer science (ENCS) building and the Visual Art (VA). They are connected but have different heights and usage.

The ENCS tower has 16 floors above the ground surface, including offices, conference rooms and some mechanical and chemical laboratories on the 12th – 16th floors. Each of the three floors has a unique atrium. On the 17th floor, there is a mechanical room divided into five rooms plus one electrical room. Two underground levels connect to the metro station, underground restaurants and a tunnel connecting to the library building and Hall building.

The VA tower also has some offices and workshops. It has 11 floors above the ground, with one floor dedicated to a mechanical room on the 12th floor. The gross floor area of the EV building is 69,204 m².

The building is a research and development building of Infineon Technologies Austria AG, world-leading provider of semiconductor solutions. It is a new building completed in 2020 with a total building area of 20,000 m² on five levels. It includes office areas and meeting rooms for around 600 employees as well as 5,500 m² of laboratory space.

With every chilled plant being unique, human optimisation is time consuming and there is a serious shortage of engineers skilled to do this work. Optimal setpoints for chilled water plants can deliver significant energy savings without equipment upgrades or new controllers, but these optimal setpoints are challenging to determine.

Exergenics’ cloud-based chilled plant optimisation software was interfaced with CSIRO’s Data Clearing House (DCH) to extract and process historical chilled plant data from CSIRO’s Synergy site in Canberra. This resulted in the production of optimal control setpoints for the site’s chilled plant, which were implemented to reduce the building’s energy consumption.

The Synergy site is served by 3 Air-Cooled York Screw Chillers, each with a capacity of 830 kW. The primary chilled water system is served by 3 primary chilled water pumps. The system serves 3 secondary chilled water loops and includes a thermal storage (buffer) tank.

Demand-side response solution using model predictive control (MPC) and flexibility functions in summer houses with swimming pool.

The target system is a cooling plant for air-conditioning in a factory building, which demands high cooling load throughout the year. The onsite operators have a lot of works except for the energy savings, therefore, automated fault detection and diagnosis (AFDD) methodology was developed and demonstrated it in real time. Operational data is diagnosed every day and each morning it is possible to confirm the AFDD result of the day before.

Post am Rochus is a large multifunctional building (47,300 m² gross floor area) combining office and retail space. It was designed to the Passive House Standard and was completed in 2017 for the Österreichische Post AG. A 5000 m² of retail space is located at the ground floor, first floor and lower ground floor of the building, while the upper floors house the Austrian Post headquarter offices. The building has a complex energy supply system. The project received a number of 1st Prize awards. 

Several buildings on the Technische Universität Graz (TU Graz) campus were used as case study within the Austrian national project “Cool-Quarter-Plus” to develop and test machine learning methods to predict energy consumption and occupancy, based on indoor air quality measurements and external weather data to inform intelligent cooling control strategies.

The Technische Universiteit Delft (TU Delft) Building 28 is one of the living labs within the Brains 4 Building project (duration: 2021-2025), funded by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs & Climate. The living labs will be used for small-scale testing and prototyping algorithms and methods to reduce energy consumption, increase comfort, respond flexibly to user behaviour and local energy supply and demand, and save on installation maintenance costs. After successful small-scale testing, other buildings will serve as use cases and validation cases for demonstrating replication and upscaling.

TU Delft Building 28 is a medium size (10,787 m²) office (88% of floor area), education (8% of floor area) and low-tech lab (4% of floor area) at the TU Delft campus. The building was built in 2002 and fully renovated in 2018 to an energy label A. The energy systems include two high-efficiency natural gas-fired boilers.

The case study examines the photovoltaic energy production of seven plants at the Politecnico di Torino (PoliTo) campus, an Italian university located in the Piedmont region. Over the years, the campus has undergone various expansions, including the recent conversion of an industrial hub into classrooms and the addition of new buildings for research centres and laboratories. To meet the increasing electricity demand of these buildings, seven photovoltaic plants have been installed across different locations on campus.

These photovoltaic plants were installed over several years, each with varying installed capacities, array configurations and monitoring infrastructures. At the time of writing (2024) the total installed photovoltaic capacity had reached nearly 1 MW. Given the size of the plants and their significant impact on the campus’s energy expenditure, a continuous energy monitoring system and an anomaly detection tool have been implemented. This system facilitates photovoltaic load forecasting and estimation and provides real-time alerts in the event of malfunctions or suboptimal performance at the site.

The Varennes Net-Zero Energy Library is a 2,000 m² municipal library building located in the town of Varennes, about 40 km away from Montréal. This library, developed through an initiative of the municipality of Varennes with the collaboration of CanmetENERGY (Natural Resources Canada) and Concordia University, was designed through an integrated design process (“design charrette”) that brought together a strong team of architecture and engineering professionals from the Montréal region. The building was inaugurated in 2014. Technologies integrated into the design of the building include ground-source heat pumps (GSHP), hydronic radiant slab, electric vehicle charging stations, motorised windows for natural cooling, horizontal exterior louvers on south façade for daylight control. One of the key technologies featured is a 110 kWe building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) system; 1/6 of the roof area also works as a building integrated photovoltaic thermal (BIPV/T) system that preheats the ventilation air. These systems, along with energy efficiency measures and a design made to optimise solar energy utilisation, has led to a near net-zero energy performance.

Transactive energy is an integral aspect of the global ongoing energy transition for Quebec. This involves modelling and controlling residential, institutional and commercial users loads to allow demand-side energy flexibility participation in the local energy market and evaluation of their impact on the grid system.

This project aims to deliver an energy platform to learn how dynamic energy exchanges can be tailored to the needs of participating customers and market conditions of the electricity network. This is achieved by means of an agent-based model (ABM) that enables to understand the economic and technical constraints required to harmonise energy transaction, demand-side flexibility and energy prices between neighbourhoods and the grid.

The institutional building of the Varennes library is used as a case study to increase the knowledge on the impact of occupancy behaviour and preference on the local market. The library includes unique and innovative features, such as a building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) system, geothermal heat pumps as the main heating/cooling source, and hydronic radiant slab for thermal storage.

This building and its associated assets are integrated into the local energy market testbed being created. The building agents take the electrical and thermal constraints as well as some of the occupant preferences constraints into account. In this case study we use a market price, where buyers submit bids to purchase energy considering their costs and preference while sellers make tenders to sell energy by maximising their profits. A transaction will be established when their requirements are matched. The bids and transactions can be made either in exchanges or bilaterally. In addition, transaction platforms are virtualised as software applications on the cloud. Marketers are responsible for managing transactions and reducing the imbalance between energy demand and supply. With large-scale, frequent and efficient transactions, the market price will gradually stabilise and balance supply and demand.

This case study features information and data gathered from over 100 commercial organizations that participated in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Smart Energy Analytics Campaign (the Campaign). The Campaign was managed by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) and ran from 2016-2020 to provide free technical assistance to organizations implementing energy management and information systems.

The government office complex (GOC) located in Kowloon, Hong Kong consists of two office towers (16 and 18 stories respectively), totalling over 98,000 m² of space for government bureaus and departments. The complex has a central chiller plant located in the basement that supplies chilled water to the towers’ air conditioning systems through a network of pipes. The chiller plant contains three 3,517 kW water-cooled chillers (two operational, and one backup), along with one 3,517 kW heat recovery chiller for added cooling and heating capacity. The Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD) developed AI models for cooling-load prediction and overall chiller system’s coefficient of performance (COP) evaluation by means of historical data from the building management system (BMS) and real-time data collected from internet of things (IoT) sensors.

The Museum of London (MoL) has embarked on an extraordinary journey to create a new museum for London (UK). This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reconceive what a museum for London can be and deliver the best City Museum in the world. Accordingly, we are designing the new museum as a smart building. To inform the design, implementation and operational use of the smart museum, we created a smart building prototype at one of our other museum properties and an additional office and storage facility — these are the Museum of London Docklands and Mortimer Wheeler House. This case study refers to this prototype.

The Museum of London is a public institution that collects, preserves and displays the history and culture of London from prehistoric times to the present. MoL currently manages and operates three buildings located in the Greater London Area: (1) the Museum of London Docklands, a 200-year-old warehouse close to the river Thames in Canary Wharf; (2) the Mortimer Wheeler House, the largest archaeological archive in the world; and (3) the Museum of London Wall, which closed in December 2022 to prepare for the move to a new smart Museum of London at West Smithfield, opening in 2026. Since 2020, the existing museums have been part of a major digital transformation project that aims to inform the development of the new smart museum at Smithfield, enabling MoL to evaluate energy, carbon, building performance and efficiencies across the entire portfolio, including the connectivity of the buildings with the grid.

HiLo (High performance, Low emissions) is a unit in NEST (Next Evolution in Sustainable Building Technologies), a research and innovation building located in Dübendorf (Switzerland) operated by the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa). It is the result of an integrated design process led by the Architecture and Building Systems (A/S) and Block Research Group (BRG) at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich) and became fully operational in the spring of 2022.