Real Time Net Zero Energy Building Energy Manager with Heterogeneous Wireless Ad hoc Network Adaptable To IoT Architectures

Abstract

Significant energy consumption by buildings from utility grid has made researchers revisit existing Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS). Most of the developing countries have taken a green initiative of Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) to reduce carbon foot print and fast depletion of conventional energy sources. Though the integration of solar and wind based systems to grid is successful in recent years, residential building energy management systems with renewable energy sources is still an evolving research area. Monitoring, control and actuation systems should be tightly coupled with the help of any to any device communication namely Internet of Things (IoT) to realize an efficient NZEB. In this paper a real time NZEB is proposed and developed with bi-directional wireless sensor and actuation system. Proposed NZEB central server collects and maintains a database of on site solar generation, battery state of charge and load power consumption data of a building with help of IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 wireless networks. Proposed system was deployed as a test bed with sensing, control, actuation and server modules and connecting them with a bi-directional wireless network architecture similar to IoT. Data observed at experimental test bed confirm that developed system can estimate on site solar power generation, state of charge on battery bank and load power consumption with negligible error. A simulation study with experimental data collected at NZEB test bed shows that NZEB can optimally schedule loads between local generation and utility grid thereby minimizing peak demand on the grid.