Energy-related Information Research Articles

Sustainable Design of Buildings using Semantic BIM and Semantic Web Services

In response to the growing concerns about climate change and the environment, sustainable design of buildings is increasingly demanded by building owners and users. However, fast evaluation of various design options and identification of the optimized design requires application of design analysis tools such as energy modeling, daylight simulations, and natural ventilation analysis software. Energy analysis requires access to distributed sources of information such as building element material properties provided by designers, mechanical equipment information provided by equipment manufacturers, weather data provided by weather reporting agencies, and energy cost data from energy providers. Gathering energy related information from different sources and inputting the information to an energy analysis application is a time consuming process. This causes delays and increases the time for comparing different design alternatives. This paper discusses how Semantic Web technology can facilitate information collection from several sources for energy analysis. Semantic Web enables sharing, accessing, and combining information over the Internet in a machine process-able format. This would free building designers to concentrate on building design optimization rather than spending time on data preparation and manual entry into energy analysis applications.

Integrated smart grid systems security threat model

The smart grid (SG) integrates the power grid and the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) with the aim of achieving more reliable and safe power transmission and distribution to the customers. Integrating the power grid with the ICT exposes the SG to systems security threats and vulnerabilities that could be compromised by malicious users and attackers. This paper presents a SG systems threats analysis and integrated SG Systems Security Threat Model (SSTM). The reference architecture of the SG, with its components and communication interfaces used to exchange the energy-related information, is integrated with the results of SG systems security threat analysis to produce a comprehensive, integrated SG SSTM. The SG SSTM in this paper helps better depict and understand the vulnerabilities exploited by attackers to compromise the components and communication links of the SG. The SG SSTM provides a reference of the systems security threats for industrial security practitioners, and can be used for design and implementation of SG systems security controls and countermeasures.

Geometry simplification according to semantic constraints

The building industry and facility management is in a state of upheaval: The complexity of the real world is now represented in its digital counterpart. The established object-based file format "Industrial Foundation Classes (IFC)" developed by the International Alliance for Interoperability facilitates interoperability in the context of Building Information Modeling. Unfortunately, there is no feasible workflow for filtering energy-related information, e.g. a streamlined version of the building geometry. Simplification methods often fail on CAD data that is ignorant of domain specific semantic information (i.e. functional differences between a door and stucco are not reflected in the geometry and are therefore often ignored). With EU law now requiring energy performance certificates to be issued for all buildings, energy performance analysis becomes an increasingly important topic. Accurate, yet efficient calculation depends on simple building models. However, typical IFC models contain a lot of irrelevant data, in particular geometric representations, which are too detailed for energy performance analysis. Therefore, we propose an algorithm that extracts input models suitable for calculations directly from IFC models in a semi-automatic process. The key aspect of the algorithm is geometry simplification subject to semantic and functional groups; more specifically, the 3D representations of walls, slabs, windows, doors, etc. are reduced to a collection of surfaces describing the building's thermal shell on one hand, and the material layers associated with it on the other hand. This simplification takes into account semantic constraints and expert knowledge. Furthermore, it works on "real-world" data; i.e. it is robust towards incomplete, imperfect and inconsistent data.

Anchoring energy efficiency information in households’ everyday projects: peoples’ understanding of renewable heating systems

This article claims that the contents of energy conservation information policy instruments must be better adapted to household members’ everyday life experiences in order to capture their interest and transform information into action. The article elaborates on how to ground energy policy information in the everyday doings and strivings of households. Using two time-geographical concepts, i.e. activity and project, we investigate how people understand and define their energy-related activities as parts of overarching everyday projects with a focus on the constraints on energy conservation. The analysis is empirically based on interview data from a case study of households’ use of renewable heating technologies. The results illustrate how peoples’ heating activities are related to everyday projects such as reducing environmental impact, comfort for a convenient daily life, the household budget balance, learning about and/or maintaining home technologies and hobbies. One conclusion is that information instruments focusing solely on one or two such projects might hamper the translation from information to action and also limit the number of people interested in or able to access the information. Another conclusion is that the growing use of energy-efficient technologies might influence new habits and perceptions of the everyday use of energy, making common economic motives for saving energy less useful. Anchoring energy-related information and support in the everyday activities and projects of households would facilitate the translation process. If this is achieved, information could prove a useful instrument in the broader reorganization of societal institutions in a sustainable direction.

Simulation-Based Total Energy Demand Estimation of Buildings using Semantic 3D City Models

The present climate and environmental policy efforts require comprehensive planning regarding the modification of the energy supply and infrastructures in cities. The strategic planning of the different measures requires a holistic approach and the combination of extensive and complex information. Within this paper, current developments in the context of the project Energy Atlas Berlin are presented. The Energy Atlas Berlin is based on the semantic information model of CityGML and provides an integrative data backbone for the common spatio-semantic representation of the city structure including energy related information of different themes. The virtual 3D city model of Berlin (mainly LOD2 building models) is used as data basis and has been enriched by information of different stakeholders and disciplines. In order to ensure the energy supply, the knowledge about the energy demands of buildings during the planning and optimization of measures is of great strategic importance. Therefore, this paper focuses on the city-wide estimation of the energy demands of buildings including heating, electricity and warm water energy in the city of Berlin using available official geobase and statistical data integrated within the Energy Atlas Berlin. It is explained in detail how the spatial and semantic properties of the 3D building models are being used to estimate these energy demands on an individual building level for the entire city.

A proposal for a site location planning model of environmentally friendly urban energy supply plants using an environment and energy geographical information system (E-GIS) database (DB) and an artificial neural network (ANN)

This study proposes a site location potential model for urban energy supply plants and renewable energy availability using an environment and energy geographical information system (E-GIS) database (DB) and an artificial neural network (ANN). This model addresses the technical methodology of examining the potential for the suitability of urban energy supply plants and renewable energy latency in a region for support material for urban energy supply planning in the draft plan development stage. The applicability of this model is examined by applying it for a planned city in the Republic of Korea, where urban planning is in process. The results from this study are as follows:(1)The E-GIS DB was integrated with geography, climate, and energy-related information to construct an ANN model that can manage, in an integrated manner, the factors that affect the site location of the energy supply plants.(2)The input dataset included the topography, land cover classification, accessibility, water usability, and energy demand, and the target dataset included the system capacity of domestically installed energy supply plants.(3)The site location potential model of the ANN for the urban energy supply plants and renewable energy availability was deduced, and the Levenberg–Marquardt (trainlm) and scaled conjugate gradient (trainscg) algorithms were used. The potentiality class map was constructed for 10 types of energy supply systems and renewable energy resources.(4)The applicability of this energy model was tested in the Gwang-myung/Si-heung public housing district area, a domestic ‘planned city’ of the Republic of Korea. The most appropriate urban energy supply systems for the research area were considered to be the general hydraulic power and solar power based on the topographic conditions and profitable locations for solar resources in Korea. Wind power generation was found to be the least suitable.(5)In terms of the wind energy potential, the technical wind power generation by horizontal – axis wind turbines is unattainable even in the area that has the maximum wind speed, and at least a 10-kW rated power wind turbine should be installed for vertical – axis wind turbines in the research area of interest. In terms of the solar energy potential, the maximum electric power generation potential is 413, 186MJ/month·mesh, which is applied by mono-crystalline bulk PV.

Renewable Energy on the Internet: The Readability of Indonesian Biomass Websites

As Indonesian people are among twenty largest internet users in the world, they nowadays access internet to search any information including renewable energy-related information. This paper aim to examine the quality of information about renewable energy from biomass in Indonesian language (Bahasa Indonesia) retrieved from the internet. A hundred selected websites’ contents were studied by identifying Indonesian websites on biomass. In this current study, the website quality is determined by examining readability level using three standards. The result showed that information on biomass energy is still too difficult to understand by common people. The result may also become a success indicator of biomass education in Indonesia as a key role for its implementation in the near future.

Non-Intrusive Hybrid Energy Monitoring System

When the optimization of the manufacturing units is considered, the management usually focus on equipment costs and technology parameters. However, being the rising price of the energy, the energy efficiency has become a sensitive issue. Detailed energy related information should be collected in order to understand the consumption profile of each relevant machine/process and identify potential energy savings. Data gathering is time-consuming and very expensive since individual metering devices have to be used for each consumer. To overcome this inconvenient, several solution have been reported. All of them are making use of a single metering device (monitoring the overall energy consumption) and some Load Signature Identification algorithms, used to disaggregate the overall energy between the identified consumers. Their relatively low detection rate (about 80-90%) hindered the spread of LSI-based architectures. In this context, a new hybrid architecture is proposed in this paper, together with it's hybrid LSI algorithm. Several test performed in an electronic prototyping facility result in a detection rate close to 100%.

CITY-WIDE TOTAL ENERGY DEMAND ESTIMATION OF BUILDINGS USING SEMANTIC 3D CITY MODELS AND STATISTICAL DATA

Abstract. The present climate and environmental policy efforts require comprehensive planning regarding the modification of the energy supply and infrastructures in cities. The strategic planning of the different measures requires a holistic approach and the combination of extensive and complex information. Within this paper, current developments in the context of the project Energy Atlas Berlin are presented. The Energy Atlas Berlin is based on the semantic information model of CityGML and provides an integrative data backbone for the common spatio-semantic representation of the city structure including energy related information of different themes. The virtual 3D city model of Berlin (mainly LOD2 building models) is used as data basis and has been enriched by information of different stakeholders and disciplines. In order to ensure the energy supply, the knowledge about the energy demands of buildings during the planning and optimization of measures is of great strategic importance. Therefore, this paper focuses on the city-wide estimation of the energy demands of buildings including heating, electricity and warm water energy in the city of Berlin using available official geobase and statistical data integrated within the Energy Atlas Berlin. It is explained in detail how the spatial and semantic properties of the 3D building models are being used to estimate these energy demands on an individual building level for the entire city.

Network approach for local and community governance of energy: The case of Oxfordshire

One of the many barriers to the incorporation of local and community actors in emerging energy governance structures and policy delivery mechanisms is the lack of thorough understanding of how they work in practice, and how best to support and develop effective local energy governance. Taking a meso-level perspective and a network approach to governance, this paper sheds some new light on this issue, by focusing on the relation, channels of communication and interactions between low carbon community groups (LCCGs) and other actors. Based on data gathered from LCCGs in Oxfordshire, UK, via network survey and interviews the research maps the relations in terms of the exchanges of information and financial support, and presents a relation-based structure of local energy governance. Analysis reveals the intensity of energy related information exchanges that is taking place at the county level and highlights the centrality of intermediary organization in facilitating information flow. The analysis also identifies actors that are not very dominant in their amount of exchanges, but fill ‘weak-tie’ functions between otherwise disconnected LCCGs or other actors in the network. As an analytical tool the analysis could be useful for various state and non-state actors that want to better understand and support – financially and otherwise – actors that enable energy related local action.

An Energy Abstraction Layer for Mobile Computing Devices

Since the growing popularity of smartphones and tablet devices, energy-efficiency in mobile computing is an increasingly interesting topic. But in case of software development engineering energy-efficiency is widely neglected, even clear and simply applicable means to measure and visualize energy consumption caused by software usage is still in its infancy. This work provides basic research in the field of measuring energy and power related information on mobile computing devices and proposes an abstract specification for implementing a measurement infrastructure on different mobile computing devices.

Modeling energy consumption in next-generation wireless access-over-WDM networks with hybrid power sources

Energy consumption is now one of the most important issues for network carriers, since the majority of the energy needed for their operation is consumed in the wireless access and optical transport networks. The continuous growth in the wireless customers and traffic volumes and the consequent energy demand on modern carriers’ broadband infrastructures require reconsidering their energy efficiency, by starting from the formulation of new, more complete and representative network models that should become the foundations for modern energy-aware control plane architectures.Accordingly, this work presents a novel comprehensive energy model for next-generation wireless access-over-optical-transport networks characterized by hybrid power systems (i.e., multiple dynamically available power sources). The objective is to identify the energy-related information that need to be handled at the control plane layer to support energy-aware networking practices. Such information can be made available to suitable energy-aware routing and wavelength assignment algorithms that may exploit them to optimize the overall network energy-consumption and reducing the associated carbon footprint. The proposed model may be taken as a reference for the implementation of new energy-aware control plane protocols (routing and signaling) that make use of power-related considerations to achieve energy-efficiency and energy-awareness in wavelength-routed network infrastructures.

수중센서 네트워크에서 자기 조직화 기법을 이용한 네트워크 토폴로지 구성법

본 논문에서는 수중센서 네트워크에서 자기 조직화 기법을 활용하여 네트워크 토폴로지를 적응적으로 제어하고 노드 간 통신에 소요되는 에너지를 최소화하는 해법을 제안한다. 제안 기법은 네트워크 전체의 중앙제어 기능 없이 국지적으로 노드들 간의 시그널링을 통해 각 노드의 배터리 잔여량 정보를 공유하고 이를 바탕으로 클러스터의 헤더를 선출하거나 필요한 경우 네트워크 토폴로지를 지역적으로 조정함으로써 네트워크 전체의 수명을 연장할 수 있다. 컴퓨터 시뮬레이션을 이용하여 수중센서 네트워크에서의 대표적 토폴로지 구성법인 LEACH 기법과 제안 기법을 비교 분석한다. 이를 위한 성능 파라미터로서 네트워크 구성 일정 시간 후 배터리를 모두 소진하지 않은 생존 노드 개수, 배터리 잔여량 편차, 네트워크 구성을 위한 초기화 단계 및 구조 조정 단계에서의 에너지 소모량을 사용한다. In this paper, an adaptive scheme for network topology configuration is proposed to save the overall energy consumption in underwater acoustic sensor network. The proposed scheme employs a self-organized networking methodology where network topology is locally optimized by exchanging the energy-related information between neighboring nodes such as the remaining energy of each node, in a way that the network life time can be augmented without any centralized control function. Computer simulation is used to evaluate the proposed scheme comparing with LEACH in terms of the number of alive nodes after a given time, the deviation of individual nodes' residual energy and the energy consumption at the initialization and coordination stages.

A semantic representation of energy-related information in future smart homes

With the ever increasing device count and the introduction of pervasive computing in residential homes, naturally also the energy demand constantly rises. Currently, much effort is put in counteracting this development by making appliances more energy efficient. However, a still widely neglected potential for energy savings resides in the use, control and interaction of facilities. To reach their full efficiency during operation, a comprehensive software system that orchestrates all energy facilities in the home is needed. Such a solution also provides an integration point for decentralized energy production systems and smart grid applications. To operate successfully, the system has to be aware of a multitude of different energy parameters and facilities as well as providers in order to make energy efficient decisions on behalf of the user, thus aiding in the realization of an eco-friendly operation of the smart home. In this work, such a smart home knowledge base is realized following the Web Ontology Language (OWL) standard. Its structure makes all knowledge easily available to the smart home system and considerably supports the control processes with its inherent logic.

Citizens, Politicians and Experts in Energy Policy-Making: The Case of Finland

Theoretically, this study debates the issue of technocracy, with the role of representative democracy and expert knowledge in the Finnish energy policy-making as a focus. Policy-making is characterized by several characteristics making it special in international comparison. The study is based on a postal survey conducted among a random sample (N = 4000) representing 18–75-year old Finns in May – October 2007. Given the expert-centred tradition of Finnish science and technology policy, as well as the characteristics of Finnish political culture, we argued that Finns consider experts and producers of research knowledge to be more legitimate decision-makers than politicians in the energy policy arena. The proposition was tested using three hypotheses. Firstly, we hypothesized that the citizenry do not trust in their chances to influence energy policy-making through political institutions and general elections, and secondly, that people trust more in experts, that is research institutes and authorities as sources of energy-related information than political institutions. According to the third hypothesis, citizens stress more the normative role of experts than that of political decision-makers in the processes of planning and decision-making of energy policy The hypotheses were mainly verified. Our major finding was that even if people considered political institutions the most powerful actors in energy policy-making they did not trust their own chances to influence energy policy through political institutions. Experts were seen as the more legitimate decision-makers than politicians in energy policy.

The national exposure research laboratory's consolidated human activity database.

EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory (NERL) has combined data from 12 U.S. studies related to human activities into one comprehensive data system that can be accessed via the Internet. The data system is called the Consolidated Human Activity Database (CHAD) and is available at http:// www.epa.gov/nerl/. CHAD contains 22,968 person days of activity and is designed to assist exposure assessors and modelers in constructing population "cohorts" of people with specified characteristics that are suitable for subsequent analysis or modeling. This paper describes the studies comprising CHAD and the various intellectual foundations that underlay the gathering of human activity pattern data. Next, it provides a brief overview of the Internet version of CHAD, and discusses how the program was formulated. Emphasis is placed on how activity-specific energy expenditure estimates were developed. Finally, the paper recommends steps that should be taken to improve the collection of activity data that would improve energy expenditure estimates and related information needed for physiologically based exposure dose modeling efforts.

Regulatory and institutional measures by the state to enhance the deployment of renewable energies:: German experiences

A decisive expansion of renewable energies’ share of the energy supply can presently be achieved only through political support measures. Because a variety of factors impede the renewables’ progress on the market, an effective assistance policy must be applied in many fields. These normally include research, development, demonstration, financial market incentives, information, consulting, education and advanced training, and international cooperation. For an effective assistance policy, the legal and institutional framework conditions are of great relevance. They are often given less attention when they do not include financial assistance by the state. This paper would like to give a contribution to the discussion on such options without financial assistance by the state. Legal and institutional factors can seriously hinder the use of renewable energies. On the other hand, they can also be used to promote such energy sources. Five examples from Germany are presented to illustrate concrete possibilities for policy action within the legal and institutional frameworks which may be of interest for other countries: (1) introduction of an Electricity Feed Law (in future Renewable-Energies-Law), (2) amendment of the Energy Industry Act and of anti-trust statutes, (3) amendment of the Federal Building Code, (4) changes in the schedule of fees for architects and engineers, (5) establishment of local and regional energy agencies and a federal center for energy-related information. The contents of these very different measures and their specific impacts will be outlined. Where the nature of the measures does not allow an exact quantitative analysis of the impacts at the moment, they are described in general terms.

"Effective dissemination of energy-related information: Applying social psychology and evaluation research": Rejoinder.

"Effective dissemination of energy-related information: Applying social psychology and evaluation research": Rejoinder.

"Effective dissemination of energy-related information: Applying social psychology and evaluation research": Rejoinder.

"Effective dissemination of energy-related information: Applying social psychology and evaluation research": Rejoinder.

Effective dissemination of energy-related information: Applying social psychology and evaluation research.

Effective dissemination of energy-related information: Applying social psychology and evaluation research.