Towards a Sustainable University Campus, a digital system
In January 2024, TU Dublin officially launched the HEA-funded project Towards a Sustainable University Campus The €1 million decarbonisation initiative aims to transform the university’s buildings into hubs of sustainability and innovation through smart energy management and data-driven decision-making.
The project pilots a scalable digital system for energy, health and comfort monitoring and reporting in the following three campus buildings, in line with TU Dublin’s Climate Action Roadmap.
Greenway Hub
Located on the Grangegorman campus, the Greenway Hub, built in 2017, hosts the Sustainability and Health research hub. This building of 4,270m2 has many research laboratories that, by their nature, are energy-intensive spaces, making it ideal for showcasing the potential for carbon footprint reductions in such building types.
Tallaght Main Building
Located on Tallaght campus, this large 15,620m2 building was built in 1992. It is a challenge because of its size, age, and multi-functional usage, including teaching, research, administration, and large communal areas. The building is connected to a district heating system supplied by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centre. This building is an example to identify scalability issues when replicating the project to other buildings and to show case the return on investment for energy and water conservation measures.
Áras Eolas (Block E)
Located on the Blanchardstown campus, this smaller 3,820m2 building built in 2002 mainly contains classrooms and laboratories. A key advantage of this building is that it is a perfect replica of Áras Fioas (Block F), which will undergo a façade retrofit upgrade, thereby providing valuable insights on the resulting energy and cost benefits by comparing baselined and adjusted energy consumptions while also being a case-study to optimise energy consumption in small educational buildings.
These three buildings are connected to electrical (MPRN), gas (GPRN), and water (WPRN) meters connected to multiple buildings. Analysing energy and water bills, we can only estimate resource consumptions, which are typically based on square meters and can be potentially adjusted considering the building type and building energy rating (BER) of connected buildings, as display energy certificates (DEC) are typically unavailable. This analysis told project researchers that the three buildings are high carbon dioxide (CO2) emitters. However, the spatial and temporal distribution of resources, fundamental to optimising the building operation, require additional sensors.
A fundamental issue of a lack of data is now being addressed in collaboration with TU Dublin Campus & Estates with the installation of unique electrical, gas, and water meters which can monitor the performance of the whole building. Each building integrates sensors which monitor the energy and water consumption of services. However, knowledge of resource distribution and performances over a floor, zone and room level requires the installation of strategically placed sensors.
The underlying challenge is accessing updated mechanical and electrical (M&E) drawings and their digitalisation for upcoming data integration. While most existing sensors are connected to a building management system (BMS), some infrastructures (e.g., IoT sensors for health and comfort, Photovoltaic (PV) installation) appearing on-site are not integrated into the BMS. Instead, these may communicate with a gateway or a networked management system with data terminating onto a separate web application, with or without Application Programming Interfaces (API). This results in information being decentralised, under-utilised, and likely creating duplication of efforts and costs.
A solution may reside in a thinking change and amending our procurement processes to systematically integrate sensors’ data into the BMS and the energy management system (EMS) to be commissioned. The versatility of the EMS is essential as it connects data from/to the BMS, building energy/physics models, building information modelling and management (BIMM) systems, and digital twins. The EMS shall provide various user-centric dashboards, i.e. tailored to users’ knowledge, skills, and needs, rather than overloading users with information that may be difficult to map and understand.
In addition to the dynamic/transient data from sensors, one must consider the availability of semi-static (i.e., occasionally changing) data such as construction, structural, architectural, space, usage, and asset information, as well as data from IT systems (e.g., room booking systems, academic schedules, Wi-Fi networks, security systems). Here again, centralisation and re-distribution of information, enabling the Living Lab approach, is fundamental.
As for the three buildings, large amounts of semi-static information would typically be held by Campus & Estates and Campus Planning. However, relevant information would typically be found with collaborative partners such as the Grangegorman Development Agency (GDA) and relevant disciplines in, for example, the Schools of Surveying and Construction Innovation, the School of Architecture, Building and Environment, and the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Each department may have separately developed or acquired digital models of buildings and campuses. It is then necessary to develop the digital space and process to centralise and manage information which will benefit everyone – operation, research, education, administration, building occupants and the public.
The operation of buildings is intrinsically linked to their use, which can be viewed and planned utilising various IT systems such as room booking systems, timetabling systems, access cards, and Wi-Fi networks. The three former Institutes of Technologies that merged to form TU Dublin typically used separate IT systems. The more IT systems are used, the more complicated the integration of data, making the homogenisation of systems and simplifying data connections necessary. While some IT systems have been homogenised across the three main campuses, pan-university IT systems are being developed.
These buildings, spread over TU Dublin campuses, represent three different academic building typologies capturing diverse data, information, size, infrastructure, usage, occupancy, energy, water, health and comfort, behavioural, financial, procurement, IT, and collaboration challenges encountered in academic facilities. These challenges are being addressed with:
- digital technologies,
- upskilling stakeholders to develop and use digital technologies,
- collaborations across university functions and external stakeholders,
- considering internal policy updates, and
- alignment and consolidation of operational, research and educational projects.
Digital technologies, including IoT sensors and interactive, user-centric dashboards, digital twins, and building physics models, will be utilised to enhance existing energy monitoring and control systems by enabling real-time energy data collection and analysis. The adopted living-lab approach will empower occupants and encourage their active participation in reducing the buildings’ carbon footprint. Lessons learned from the pilot will also be shared with higher education institutions and the public sector, in general, to assist them in implementing similar sustainability initiatives and advancing their decarbonisation efforts.
The project will facilitate the development of informed decarbonisation strategies that are replicable and scalable across TU Dublin’s campuses. Addressing inherent challenges such as fragmented and manual energy monitoring systems, limited IoT adoption, and disconnected data repositories aims to position TU Dublin as a leader in sustainable campus management.
The Towards a Sustainable University Campus project is led by Dr Philippe Lemarchand, Head of Sustainability Intelligence, and it's team Dr Ahmed Hassan, Dr Tarun Kumar, and Dr Kumar Raushan.