2023
March
20

Driving to Carbon Neutrality with Wireless IP Networks

By Eddy Odijk, Neovate Innovation Partners

Buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, improving energy performance of buildings has become a major cornerstone in the EU efforts to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, and –nearer in the future– to reduce EU emissions by at least 55% by 2030 (“Fit for 55”).

Source: European Union Fact Sheet - Energy Performance of Buildings

Energy Performance In Buildings Directive
The current Energy Performance in Buildings Directive version, EPBD III, has been in effect since the start of 2020. Unlike an EU regulation that has binding legal force across the member states, the rules and guidelines of a directive are transposed into national legislation by each member state. That means that there may be differences between national laws, for example in the date when a rule becomes valid.

How does EPBD III tackle its objectives of providing a substantial contribution to “Fit for 55” and beyond? First, it sets rules for system requirements of technical building systems, for technical inspections of heating and air conditioning systems, and for installation of charging infrastructure for electric transport. Furthermore, it distinguishes between existing buildings, major renovations to existing buildings and new buildings.

For this blog, we are focused on system requirements of technical building systems.

Minimal Energy Performance Standards
All buildings have to comply with Minimal Energy Performance Standards (MEPS) for heating, cooling, ventilation, hot tap water and lighting. Beyond that, majorly renovated and all new buildings, need to have self-regulating air temperature control for individual rooms. This can be implemented by room- or radiator thermostats, and by a Building and Control System (BACS). For non-residential renovations and new buildings with an HVAC output power above 290 kilowatts, such as BACS is mandatory from 2026 onward, for example in the Netherlands.

The systems must be capable of:

• Continuously monitoring, logging, analyzing and allowing for adjusting energy use
• Benchmarking the building’s energy efficiency, detecting losses in efficiency of technical building systems, and informing the person responsible for the facilities or technical building management about opportunities for energy efficiency improvement
•  Allowing communication with connected technical building systems and other appliances inside the building, and being interoperable with technical building systems across different types of proprietary technologies, devices and manufacturers.
• Delivering on the Building Directive. The European Union’s EPBD III directive sets goals and requirements to improve the energy performance of buildings. The industry is responsible for delivering on these requirements through the architectures and technologies they use.

Autonomous Buildings
The EPBD clearly steers the building infrastructure towards digital tools that allow it to automatically adjust heating, lighting and other systems to the number of people present at any given time, using real-time data analysis. Such autonomous buildings are ultra-efficient, fully electric and digital, perhaps using solar panels to supply power, and can be managed remotely. And these smart systems are connected systems, with several communicating subsystems, each in turn connected to a variety of sensors that monitor the various aspects down to the individual room level.

There are already several examples of what can be achieved: the Edge building in Amsterdam and the new Siemens headquarters in Munich and are among the most sustainable office buildings in the world. Equipped with solar panels and thermal energy storage, with LED lights in combination with daylight sensors and presence detectors, and smart management systems, the carbon footprint is almost zero. The benefits go beyond EPBD requirements, and include reported improvements of health, comfort and productivity of employees, going as far as allowing them to use an application on their smartphones to control the lighting and climate in their individual workspaces.

Transformation of the Value Chain
One could say that the EPBD is a booster for the digital transformation of building automation. Such transformation consists of a number of steps that transform not only the technology but often the value chain as well: digital technologies enable connectivity, connectivity enables the exchange of data, data can deliver useful information when processed by algorithms, and thus value in the chain partly moves from system components towards connectivity and application services. Many industries (e.g. PC, Internet) have already gone through such digital transformation, and that means that lessons from other industries can be applied to our efforts in building automation.

Unifying On IP-based Connectivity
One such lesson is that the choice of a connectivity protocol is not the differentiator. Real progress and scale up happens only after an industry has aligned on a single technology, and then network effects and economies of scale kick in. And, not surprisingly, industry after industry has singled out the IP protocol as the one to align on, thereby following the paradigm that was set by the computer industry in the 1980s and soon after became the universal technology underlying the internet. When, after earlier fragmentation, office networks eventually transitioned to IP, ease of maintenance, versatility and interoperability vastly increased, and a competitive ecosystem of suppliers flourished.

Meanwhile, IP can also serve as the foundation for networks of connected devices in homes and buildings. Protocol additions, as well as advancements in microcontroller technology and software, have created affordable implementations for devices that are constrained in processing power, energy consumption and price. That IP is the direction to go, is also being acknowledged by well-known connectivity standards in professional building automation.

 
Thread was founded as an IP-based secure mesh networking protocol to provide low bandwidth and power efficient communications in a robust, reliable and secure way and to provide an IP foundation for various applications. KNX, BACnet and DALI are now offering IP-based versions of their application protocols for building automation use cases. Matter, the new unifying smart home  protocol developed by The Connectivity Standards Alliance and backed by major smart home ecosystem and platform companies  like Google, Apple and Amazon, is also fully based on IP.

Robust Wireless Technology
A technology that is much needed to meet the stringent time frame of EPBD is wireless connectivity. However, transitioning from wired to wireless connectivity presents challenges around security and reliability.

Thread, as an IP-based wireless technology  can seamlessly integrate with other parts of an IP network. This seamless integration, without gateways or converter boxes, has the important advantage of a single end-to-end security method which addresses one of the most often voiced challenges in wireless technology. Another challenge voiced is that wireless communication cannot be reliable enough resulting in building automation failures. Thread also provides a solution for this challenge with the mesh structure of its networks. This mesh structure allows for sufficient alternative data routes to reach even far away nodes.

Matter has exclusively chosen Thread as its low-power and low-latency wireless network foundation. KNX and DALI have also selected Thread as the primary low-power wireless networking component deployed with the IP-based versions of their protocols.

Building Energy Performance
All of these developments in wireless technology and an alignment on IP-foundations at the application level, facilitate the path to a rapid roll-out of building products and systems that comply with EPBD and ultimately lead to carbon neutrality.