Short-term load forecasting (STLF), which typically ranges from hour-ahead to a few days ahead, plays a multitude of critical roles.

Short-term forecasting of residential and commercial building energy consumption is widely used in power systems and continues to grow in importance. Data-driven short-term load forecasting (STLF), although promising, has suffered from a lack of open, large-scale datasets with high building diversity. This has hindered exploring the pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm for STLF. To help address this, we present BuildingsBench, which consists of: 1) Buildings-900K, a large-scale dataset of 900K simulated buildings representing the U.S. building stock; and 2) an evaluation platform with over 1,900 real residential and commercial buildings from 7 open datasets. BuildingsBench benchmarks two under-explored tasks: zero-shot STLF, where a pretrained model is evaluated on unseen buildings without fine-tuning, and transfer learning, where a pretrained model is fine-tuned on a target building.

Short-term load forecasting (STLF), which typically ranges from hour-ahead to a few days ahead, plays a multitude of critical roles.

Thermal energy storage (TES) is an effective method for load shifting and demand response in buildings. Optimal TES control and management are essential to improve the performance of the cooling system. Most existing TES systems operate on a fixed schedule, which cannot take full advantage of its load shifting capability, and requires extensive investigation and optimization. This study proposed a novel integrated load prediction and optimized control approach for ice-based TES in commercial buildings. A cooling load prediction model was developed and a mid-day modification mechanism was introduced into the prediction model to improve the accuracy. Based on the predictions, a rule-based control strategy was proposed according to the time-of-use tariff; the mid-day control adjustment mechanism was introduced in accordance with the mid-day prediction modifications. The proposed approach was applied in the ice-based TES system of a commercial complex in Beijing, and achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 389 kW and coefficient of variance of MAE of 12.5 %. The integrated prediction-based control strategy achieved an energy cost saving rate of 9.9 %. The proposed model was deployed in the realistic building automation system of the case building and significantly improved the efficiency and automation of the cooling system.

Short-term forecasting of residential and commercial building energy consumption is widely used in power systems and continues to grow in importance. Data-driven short-term load forecasting (STLF), although promising, has suffered from a lack of open, large-scale datasets with high building diversity. This has hindered exploring the pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm for STLF. To help address this, we present BuildingsBench, which consists of: 1) Buildings-900K, a large-scale dataset of 900K simulated buildings representing the U.S. building stock; and 2) an evaluation platform with over 1,900 real residential and commercial buildings from 7 open datasets. BuildingsBench benchmarks two under-explored tasks: zero-shot STLF, where a pretrained model is evaluated on unseen buildings without fine-tuning, and transfer learning, where a pretrained model is fine-tuned on a target building.

Short-term forecasting of residential and commercial building energy consumption is widely used in power systems and continues to grow in importance. Data-driven short-term load forecasting (STLF), although promising, has suffered from a lack of open, large-scale datasets with high building diversity. This has hindered exploring the pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm for STLF. To help address this, we present BuildingsBench, which consists of: 1) Buildings-900K, a large-scale dataset of 900K simulated buildings representing the U.S. building stock; and 2) an evaluation platform with over 1,900 real residential and commercial buildings from 7 open datasets. BuildingsBench benchmarks two under-explored tasks: zero-shot STLF, where a pretrained model is evaluated on unseen buildings without fine-tuning, and transfer learning, where a pretrained model is fine-tuned on a target building. The main finding of our benchmark analysis is that synthetically pretrained models generalize surprisingly well to real commercial buildings. An exploration of the effect of increasing dataset size and diversity on zero-shot commercial building performance reveals a power-law with diminishing returns. We also show that fine-tuning pretrained models on real commercial and residential buildings improves performance for a majority of target buildings. We hope that BuildingsBench encourages and facilitates future research on generalizable STLF. All datasets and code can be accessed from https://github.com/NREL/BuildingsBench.

With more than 32% of the global energy used by commercial and residential buildings, there is an urgent need to revisit traditional approaches to Building Energy Management (BEM). With HVAC systems accounting for about 40% of the total energy cost in the commercial sector, we propose a low-complexity DRL-based model with multi-input multi-output architecture for the HVAC energy optimization of open-plan offices, which uses only a handful of controllable and accessible factors. The efficacy of our solution is evaluated through extensive analysis of the overall energy consumption and thermal comfort levels compared to a baseline system based on the existing HVAC schedule in a real building. This comparison shows that our method achieves 37% savings in energy consumption with minimum violation (<1%) of the desired temperature range during work hours. It takes only a total of 40 minutes for 5 epochs (about 7.75 minutes per epoch) to train a network with superior performance and covering diverse conditions for its low-complexity architecture; therefore, it easily adapts to changes in the building setups, weather conditions, occupancy rate, etc. Moreover, by enforcing smoothness on the control strategy, we suppress the frequent and unpleasant on/off transitions on HVAC units to avoid occupant discomfort and potential damage to the system. The generalizability of our model is verified by applying it to different building models and under various weather conditions.

Precise load forecasting in buildings could increase the bill savings potential and facilitate optimized strategies for power generation planning. With the rapid evolution of computer science, data-driven techniques, in particular the Deep Learning models, have become a promising solution for the load forecasting problem. These models have showed accurate forecasting results; however, they need abundance amount of historical data to maintain the performance. Considering the new buildings and buildings with low resolution measuring equipment, it is difficult to get enough historical data from them, leading to poor forecasting performance. In order to adapt Deep Learning models for buildings with limited and scarce data, this paper proposes a Building-to-Building Transfer Learning framework to overcome the problem and enhance the performance of Deep Learning models. The transfer learning approach was applied to a new technique known as Transformer model due to its efficacy in capturing data trends. The performance of the algorithm was tested on a large commercial building with limited data. The result showed that the proposed approach improved the forecasting accuracy by 56.8% compared to the case of conventional deep learning where training from scratch is used. The paper also compared the proposed Transformer model to other sequential deep learning models such as Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). The accuracy of the transformer model outperformed other models by reducing the root mean square error to 0.009, compared to LSTM with 0.011 and RNN with 0.051.

Long View is proud to announce that the company has been recognized as a leader in sustainability by its key partners Microsoft and Cisco -- having been named a Sustainability Changemaker by Microsoft Canada and winner of Cisco's Digital Sustainability Challenge 2022. Microsoft recognized Long View as a Sustainability Changemaker in 2022 for its heavy investment in creating a government machine learning solution that will protect oceans from overfishing and communities from the harmful impact of severe flooding events. They did this by building repeatable, scalable, cross-industry solutions for the modernization of business-critical systems and deploying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence platforms for better business and sustainability decisions. Cisco has awarded the company for its work over the past year in partnership with Sensible Building Science to offer clients innovative solutions to automate ventilation, heating and cooling in commercial buildings to zones where occupants are located. This has been proven to provide 5-10% in carbon reductions which, if scaled across a market of 5.5 million commercial buildings, would result in a carbon reduction of 3 to 6 million tonnes.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Buildings have been one of the most voracious users of IoT devices. Smart buildings, in particular, use connected devices to measure everything from temperature, lighting, air quality, noise, vibration, occupancy levels and energy consumption -- and that's just the very tip of the iceberg. Building automation is big and getting bigger, with well over 6 million commercial buildings in the U.S. alone and an estimated 2.2 billion connected devices deployed. The global market for building automation systems in 2022 will reach about $80 billion.