The role of ICT in creating intelligent, energy efficient buildings

Abstract

We need to radically change the way we think with respect to how we can substantially reduce our carbon emmissions. Starting with ensuring we can create energy efficient, but still comfortable ‘Smart Buildings’. These Smart Buildings need to be the foundation of making Smart Cities. This will involve clustering Smart Buildings into practical groups of buildings to take advantage of larger scale opportunities such as district heating and cooling or microgrids. Smart Buildings will require different solutions, for example a residential solution may be different from a large hospital compared to a university campus.Innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is the key enabler to achieve and maintain the effectiveness of all existing and novel approaches to energy efficient buildings throughout the life cycle of a Smart Building. Without substantial advances in ICT our buildings will continue to be inefficient and perform poorly.Today most ICT related technology is called ‘Smart’. Unfortunately, most of the current technology in most of our current buildings is not Smart in terms of what is required to achieve energy efficient buildings. Consequently, innovative ICT is necessary to deliver the significant breakthroughs required for better control and operation of buildings. Without this capability all other innovative technology under development will be rendered ineffective. ICT is the key to Smart Buildings which can be aggregated into neighbourhoods, campuses, districts, cities and countries to provide a truly sustainable built environment.