Energy Cost and HVAC Optimization in Smart Buildings
Introduction
Abstract
With mounting concerns around climate change and the rising costs of power, optimizing and reducing energy usage is a growing challenge. In order to provide insight on the opportunity for energy usage and cost optimization, we used energy data from a building on UCSD’s campus and auxiliary information about temperature & energy costs to build a model that predicts future energy spending.
Introduction
Optimizing and reducing energy usage is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century in regards to climate change and rising costs of power. However, this challenge of optimization and frugality is not elementary. Many factors can change how much energy the same device uses - the time of day, climate trends (which inform heating needs), policy changes that limit energy in specific seasons, and more. Therefore, creating a model that takes into account all these variables and utilizes specific energy sensors available to UC San Diego’s researchers to compute energy uses and costs would give users crucial information to plan energy usage long into the future. Our goal in the project is to use energy data from a building on UCSD’s campus and auxiliary information about temperature & energy costs to build a model to predict future energy spending.