PNNL is pleased to announce a series of innovation challenges to accelerate the development of connected buildings. Through funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, we are seeking teams to join the competition with an innovative project of their own. Teams are asked to provide a solution to a targeted building-related challenge, the specification of which can be defined by the participating team.

All submitted projects are required to integrate VOLTTRON™—an open-source software platform to connect energy management devices—with smart building devices, sensors, or appliances such as heating and cooling equipment, hot-water heaters, washers and dryers, refrigerators, lighting controls, weather stations, thermostats, humidity sensors, etc.

At the end of each challenge, the teams are expected to demo their project to a judging committee. The selected team will receive further assistance to improve, test, and potentially commercialize their products.

http://bgintegration.pnnl.gov/connectedbuildings/about.asp

OPAS    Nigel David, Christopher Naismith, David Putney, Arrvindh Shriraman, and Han Bao    We will use Volttron to aggregate energy meter data, BAS data, and other APIs (eg. Weather, Simuwatt, Energy Star Portfolio) into a common auditing and continuous commissioning tool. It will eventually be marketed towards utilities for recommissioning programs such as the BC Hydro Continuous Optimization Program that focuses on identifying low-cost controls opportunities . Our vision is to include an engineering portal that allows for detailed analysis, fault detection, and measurement and verification. There will also be a client portal with higher level energy and financial views. Additionally we hope to create an occupant portal that will facilitate savings achieved through behaviour change. The first phase of the project will involve deploying the Volttron at a test-building on the Simon Fraser University campus. The BACnet driver will be used to collect data from all of the HVAC devices. Once this has been established, the data will be flagged with an appropriate naming scheme and transferred to a database. A visualization interface will be created in Volttron Central so that multi-trend views of the data are intuitive. From there, existing Volttron agents will be tested and built upon for auto-detection of low cost energy efficiency measures in the building.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]Challenge 2  We hope to see your name listed here soon! The second challenge will be announced in mid-July 2016, with registration opening shortly after.