New co-sponsored award on smart energy technologies

The Scott Institute for Energy Innovation and the Carnegie Bosch Institute have announced the winner of a joint seed grant to fund a research project that evaluates the contribution of household smart and flexible energy technologies to power grid stability and efficiency. 

Receiving this new award is Erica Cochran Hameen, an associate professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Architecture, who, along with research collaborator Nihar Pathak, a PhD student in the School of Architecture, will develop a tool to boost understanding of occupant comfort while balancing grid demand to create more effective smart home systems. 

“The energy sector intersects with a variety of disciplines, and a collaboration between the Scott Institute and the Carnegie Bosch Institute creates unique opportunities for new solutions,” said Costa Samaras, director of the Scott Institute. “One important example is Dr. Cochran Hameen’s research, which blends technical analysis of energy consumption with data about building occupant comfort to deliver both high performance buildings and more effective grid management.”

Residential buildings with HVAC systems consume a significant amount of energy in the U.S., but a more dynamic understanding of occupant behavior, comfort, and grid demand is needed to improve the effectiveness of strategies like smart home systems and energy efficiency programs. 

“Dr. Cochran Hameen’s proposal addresses the critical gap between the design of energy management strategies and the reality of how people experience and interact with their living environments,” said Alessandro Oltramari, president of the Carnegie Bosch Institute. 

To go beyond assumptions about occupant behavior and comfort, Cochran Hameen will use support from this new award to develop a residential-scale sensing platform that’s capable of monitoring indoor environmental quality parameters like lighting, acoustics, thermal conditions, and indoor air quality. 

To bring this level of analysis into residential spaces, Cochran Hameen will downsize an existing sensing and analytics platform that so far has only been deployed in commercial buildings; with the help of off-the-shelf sensors, Cochran Hameen and Pathak will create the first step on a pathway toward future standardized deployment of these platforms in homes. 

The availability of such thorough data has downstream applications toward improving the functionality of smart home applications, leading to systems that can dynamically balance occupant comfort while reducing peak demand on the power grid.