Subject: Green Soda Project

Description: Electrical energy usage in modern commercial buildings today represents a large part of our total energy expenditure and carbon footprint. The computer science building at UC Berkeley (Soda Hall) alone consumes around 600kWh of electricity per day.

This usage can be roughly broken down into three parts - HVAC, lighting, and plug-loads. While HVAC and lighting represent the larger part of the pie, plug-loads are still significant, especially in this digital age where computers and portable electronics are becoming ubiquitous. Preliminary data has shown that the plug-load usage in Soda Hall is around 20% of the total electrical usage, or 120kWh, which is certainly significant.

The Green Soda project focuses on this 20% - the plug-loads, which include everything from desktop computers to cellphone chargers, lamps, monitors, servers, network routers, refrigerators, and anything else that becomes with a plug.

In the first phase of this project, we will audit Soda Hall using a hundred ACme's deployed throughout the building. ACme (AC Meter) is a plug-through, IP-based wireless device that provides real time energy usage measurement and control for AC devices. The data from the audit will allow us to generate a time-varying map of plug-load electrical usage and help identifying various attributes of AC devices and their contribution to the total. It will also allow us to better quantify the breakdown of total electrical usage in the building. Furthermore, by correlating the individual usage with the type of AC load, we can identify opportunities for saving, both autonomously and human effort based.

ACme web portal: http://acme.cs.berkeley.edu/
ACme wiki: http://smote.cs.berkeley.edu:8000/tracenv/wiki/acme
Project description: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/Data/105708.html
Contact: Fred Jiang http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~fxjiang (fxjiang@eecs.berkeley.edu)