CREST Technology Research

SinBerBEST

Led by Professor Costas Spanos, a multi-disciplinary group of 10 to 12 faculty investigators at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a transformative research collaboration with Singapore called Building Efficiency and Sustainability in the Tropics (SinBerBEST). Our initial collaborators include Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and other agencies and groups in Singapore. The vision of the SinBerBEST program is to generate societal scale impact in the area of efficient and sustainable tropical buildings. The success of SinBerBEST will be judged on its impact in the form of creation of new industry sectors, the development of societal scale systems, and the creation of new knowledge. SinBerBEST will be located on the 11th floor in the BEARS center on the CREATE campus in Singapore.

Mission

SinBerBEST’s mission is to create an ecosystem of researchers and change agents from academia, industry, and government, and to align them towards a common goal: to spearhead ideas and technologies that have the potential of dramatically improving building energy efficiency, while maintaining comfort, safety, security, and productivity in tropical buildings.

Background

On the demand side, 40 % of the energy consumed in the US is in buildings (the number is closer to 50 % in Singapore). Thus it is not surprising that energy efficiency in buildings is an important target for a low carbon footprint, high efficiency future. While there is a great deal of regulatory activity in California, the US, the EU, and Singapore on low energy retrofits and zero-energy new buildings, it is our conviction that the bulk of current research is piecemeal and not integrated. Further, we believe that Information and Communication Technologies, including smart wireless networks (which have been developed in Berkeley as “Smart Dust’ from 2001 to the present), hold the promise of detailed monitoring and subsequent control of electricity, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning loads in the built environment.

We call our approach “M3”: Measuring, Modeling, and Mitigation. M3 was developed by the SinBerBEST PIs at Berkeley in collaboration with former Lawrence Berkeley Lab Director Steven Chu, now Secretary of Energy in the Obama Administration. M3 reflects an embedded systems view of building operating systems. The SinBerBEST collaboration will leverage Berkeley’s substantive portfolio of building efficiency research with the integration of embedded systems technologies. At Berkeley, our research collaborators in several large and ongoing centers have been developing the embedded systems expertise that is called for in this research agenda aimed at increasing building efficiency while maintaining comfort, safety, security, and productivity in tropical buildings.

Important new challenges arise for buildings in tropical zones that will require new innovations and technologies. At Berkeley, we will be using the campus as a live testbed for trying out our proposed solutions, beginning with the engineering quadrant of campus. At the BEARS center in Singapore, we will be developing a shared-use testbed for experimentation on buildings in tropical climates.

While the focus of SinBerBEST is on tropical buildings, we believe it benefits the project to stay connected with developments and colleagues in building efficiency across the globe. Thus, we bring to this partnership the relationships we have in the US, China (Tsinghua University), and Denmark (Danish Technological Institute, DTI) focusing on efficient buildings in Nordic climates and in the varied climate zones across the US and China.