Q: What does a “Connected Communities” project in Murfreesboro, TN have in common with NYSERDA’s new “Intelligent Buildings” funding opportunity and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Open Building Operating System?

A: They all seek to leverage interoperable and open-source technologies to enable and support advanced demand management by cost-effective orchestration of diverse energy assets in buildings.

In this post, ACE IoT highlights three seemingly disparate announcements and a notable common thread that connects them. We also consider whether 2023 might be the start of a new era of demand flexibility (DF) in buildings.

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As #smartbuilding buzzwords go, Monitoring-Based Commissioning or “MBCx” has a more robust history than some. As a concept, MBCx or Constant-Commissioning has been around for more than 2 decades, with its origins in the research work conducted at Texas A&M University and at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as far as back as the 1990s. The first commercial implementations of MBCx started more than a decade ago. Since MBCx is a not a buzzword du jour, what explains the reason why ACE IoT has seen a rather dramatic increase in the number of customers and potential customers exploring MBCx?

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It’s no secret that buildings account for a significant portion of global carbon emissions every year – the built environment currently contributes about 40 percent of all CO2 released into the atmosphere every year. And with 111 million existing buildings in the U.S. today (only a handful of which have may have the infrastructure or technology necessary to achieve effective decarbonization), the need for retrofitting at scale becomes paramount. That translates into roughly 10,000 buildings a day – all of which need to become optimized in order to meet these 2050 goals. Manually tuning and adjusting one room at a time within these buildings just won’t cut it.

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