  Smart energy in buildings is an important research area of Internet of Things
(IoT). Buildings as important parts of the smart grids, their energy efficiency
is vital for the environment and global sustainability. Using a
LEED-gold-certificated green office building, we built a unique IoT
experimental testbed for our energy efficiency and building intelligence
research. We first monitor and collect one-year-long building energy usage data
and then systematically evaluate and analyze them. The results show that due to
the centralized and static building controls, the actual running of green
buildings may not be energy efficient even though they may be "green" by
design. Inspired by "energy proportional computing" in modern computers, we
propose a IoT framework with smart location-based automated and networked
energy control, which uses smartphone platform and cloud computing technologies
to enable multi-scale energy proportionality including building-, user-, and
organizational-level energy proportionality. We further build a
proof-of-concept IoT network and control system prototype and carried out
real-world experiments which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
solution. We envision that the broad application of the proposed solution has
not only led to significant economic benefits in term of energy saving,
improving home/office network intelligence, but also bought in a huge social
implication in terms of global sustainability.
