The potential of new technologies in the management of the house, condo buildings and public facilities will allow us to save consumption and bills. Let’s find out how a Smart Building works, the new generation buildings.
The Italian situation In Italy, 70% of residential structures were built between 1946 and 1991, and are among the oldest buildings in Europe and at the same time the most energy-intensive in our territory. Indeed, 34% of the Italian building stock is energy class G, which means that it has a high energy consumption. These structures were built when even the building technologies were primitive, when it was not thought in the logic of the circular economy and building regulations were approximate.
The energy optimization interventions, carried out in the past years, have been focused on the efficiency of the individual components of buildings, which contributed to an increase in energy consumption. To date it has been understood that it is not enough to update or introduce new components because, for better energy performance, it is essential to check the correct use and monitor performance. This is the purpose of what is now called "Smart Buildings".
Smart Buildings In the smart building there are sensors for monitoring consumption, data transmission and implementation systems and an ICT infrastructure. This allows the real time monitoring of the plants and the study of the behavior of the systems that allow the development of forecasting models in order to determine in advance consumption and approximate expenditure.
The new technologies introduced in the houses are able to collect information and then communicate the collected data. ICT technologies contribute to greater data availability, the internal environment of the house and the energy performance of each component. It is estimated that the forecasts made by the data lead to savings of up to 20% in the residential sector and up to 30% in the non-residential sector.
The integrated systems in the houses and the study of the data that derive from them, will allow to control the consumptions and to determine the savings but they will also be able to define the demand, that is to estimate how much energy we would need daily. Data analysis is becoming increasingly central, even in the building industry, to try to limit waste, both energy and economic, achieving high environmental standards, through the development of strategies.
The data driven approach of smart buildings also allows to detect and resolve anomalies in systems. For this there is the project "Cogito", which aims to share new ideas of control and management of a building. Processed data diagnoses anomalies and can resolve inefficiencies instantly or by scheduling maintenance.
In conclusion, a building is smart when it optimizes all the functions performed within it. To sum up, the most promising application of data analysis of buildings concerns:
the forecast or estimate of demand;
energy optimization of the systems in operation;
automatic detection of equipment faults or systems' failures;
benchmark analysis;
the management of processes related to the behavior of the occupant and to employment profiles.
