Using automation in non-residential buildings to cut off standby devices

Abstract

Residential and commercial buildings are one of the major contributors to energy consumption in the EU, accounting for up to 40$\%$ of total energy consumed (European commision, 2015). As Indicated by the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, all new buildings after 2020 have to be nearly zero stock and overall the EU is moving towards zero stock energy use in buildings by 2050. With this in mind there is a need to lower current energy consumption in buildings. While many studies focus on the energy usage of households, few of them discuss energy use in a university and company context (i.e. commercial buildings). Within this area a low hanging fruit that could help decrease energy consumption is stand-by power, the consumption of power when a device is not in use. Stand-by power can consume up to 8$\%$ of a devices total energy use over its lifetime. To alleviate this problem this research, first collected data from other literature to understand the composition of an office building and with this data we created scenarios to calculate the time it would take for an automated system using different levels of automated to return a monetary value. The return on investment varies per country and scenario it is 400 days on average for Germany and 700 for Finland.