Papers for
energy management companies
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Building AI models that optimize HVAC systems across many buildings
The Smart Buildings Challenge: Learning Foundation Models for Real-World Optimization at Scale
Abstract: Buildings cause nearly 40\% of carbon emissions in the US. Of total building emissions, HVAC systems are responsible for approximately 40-60\% and account for 15\% of global energy consumption. Despite advances in artificial intelligence, most buildings still operate as inefficiently as they did decades ago. Building optimization, perhaps more so than any other optimization problem, has enormous potential for Machine Learning (ML) driven impact on climate change, in both the short and long term. One of the biggest obstacles for building optimization is the lack of policy transfer. Most building control systems, whether simulation or learning based, don't generalize: they only work well for the building they were developed for, but not for other buildings. To solve this problem, we propose a challenge for the development of building foundation models that easily adapt to new buildings with minimal configuration and thereby enable building optimization to scale across the globe. Participants will build control policies on a set of simulated buildings, and have their policies evaluated on an unseen set of buildings. The buildings vary in size, layout, weather, material properties, and HVAC system. Successful outcomes from this initiative promise a massive leap forward in global sustainability efforts and demonstrate the great potential of ML to combat climate change.
Data repair improves AI demand forecasts for US building electricity
Validated Data Onboarding for AI Demand Forecasting on U.S. Building Meter Data: Design, Controlled Evaluation, and a Corrected Negative Result
Abstract: Electric utilities and grid operators increasingly rely on machine-learning models to forecast next-day demand, and those models learn from meter data that is routinely defective: readings go missing, sensors freeze, buildings read zero for hours, and units change by a factor of 100. This report presents a data-onboarding pipeline that detects and repairs such defects before a model is trained, using only information available at forecast time, and a controlled experiment that measures whether the pipeline protects a 24-hour-ahead forecast. On hourly electricity data for twelve U.S. buildings from the public Building Data Genome 2 dataset (210,528 rows, 2016-2017), seeded, hash-logged defects touching 0.10% of the training period raised the error of a gradient-boosting forecaster by 86%; after detection and past-only repair the error returned to the clean-data level (mean absolute scaled error 0.760 clean, 1.415 corrupted, 0.729 repaired) while 93% of training targets were retained. At a defect prevalence calibrated to published field studies (1.6% of training rows) the unprotected forecaster's error reached 4.4 times that of a seasonal-naive rule, and the repaired forecaster again matched the clean baseline. The same pattern held for ridge regression and a random forest and across horizons of 1 to 24 hours. A first version of the pipeline over-cleaned natural data and made forecasts 25% worse; that result is retained, its cause is traced in the published artifacts, and the per-building calibration that corrects it is documented as a dated amendment. Every number is reproducible from pinned public inputs with SHA-256 verification, 84 automated tests and continuous integration.