Appendix A — Useful Links

Throughout the course, we will encounter useful links that may not have an appropriate place within the structure of the website/book. This list will be the default placeholder for those links.

A.1 Shared News / Links

• Does turning the air conditioning off when you’re not home actually save energy? Three engineers run the numbers
• Opportunities for students to work for and volunteer at Department of Energy affiliated sites
• Innovation in Buildings Graduate Research Fellowship (IBUILD)
• Atom Energy’s solid state circuit breaker for EV charging
• Greta Thunberg’s new book
• EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand by 2030
• An interesting learning resource for understanding Heating Ventliation and Air Conditioning systems
• Resources listed by the ACM Special Interest Group on Energy Systems and Informatics
• CMU’s Energy Week event has a Student Happy Hour & Networking Reception on 3/21. Sign up here.
• An interesting discussion about heat pumps following the announcement of a Y-Combinator funded start-up trying to sell them directly to customers.
• ACM SIGEnergy’s Graduate Student Seminar
• The Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA) Podcast
• YouTube Channel TechnologyConnections covers thermostats

A.2 Interesting papers for second third

Here are some interesting papers to consider for the second third of the course, where we will be learning about the state-of-the-art in the field with respect to smart meters and smart thermostats.

A.2.1 Papers combining electrical meters and thermostat issues:

• Non-Intrusive Techniques for Establishing Occupancy Related Energy Savings in Commercial Buildings
• Enhancing household-level load forecasts using daily load profile clustering
• Comparing Gray Box Methods to Derive Building Properties from Smart Thermostat Data
• SMITE: Using Smart Meters to Infer the Thermal Efficiency of Residential Homes
• QUILT: QUantify, Infer and Label the Thermal Efficiency of Heating and Cooling Residential Homes
• Contextually Supervised Source Separation with Application to Energy Disaggregation

A.2.2 Papers mostly related to smart thermostats

• ThermoCoach: Reducing Home Energy Consumption with Personalized Thermostat Recommendations
• Operational Characteristics of Residential Air Conditioners with Temporally Granular Remote Thermographic Imaging
• Real-Time Cooling Power Attribution for Co-located Data Center Rooms with Distinct Temperatures
• Heat Reuse Models for Liquid Cooled Data Centers integrated with District Heating
• TEA-bot: A Thermography Enabled Autonomous Robot for Detecting Thermal Leaks of HVAC Systems in Ceilings
• The Impact of Resolution of Occupancy Data on Personal Comfort Model-Based HVAC Control Performance
• Good set-points make good neighbors - User seating and temperature control in uberized workspaces
• Hot or Not: Leveraging Mobile Devices for Ubiquitous Temperature Sensing
• Exploring Fairness in Participatory Thermal Comfort Control in Smart Buildings
• The SPOT* Personal Thermal Comfort System
• A toolkit for low-cost thermal comfort sensing

A.2.3 Papers mostly related to smart meters

• Analyzing Energy Usage on a City-scale using Utility Smart Meters
• BOLT: Energy Disaggregation by Online Binary Matrix Factorization of Current Waveforms
• Rimor: Towards Identifying Anomalous Appliances in Buildings