7  Why buildings?

You have configured your computing environment, reviewed fundamental concepts in data acquisition and set up your Raspberry Pi devices. You are ready! But ready for what? In the previous chapter we discussed the three words on the title of this course (Autonomous Sustainable Buildings) and focused on defining the first two. But why are we targeting buildings in particular? Why not vehicles or financial trading agents? Well, of course, part of the answer is that you and I are both interested in buildings and in some sense that is sufficient. But are there good reasons beyond personal taste to focus our attention on buildings when developing sustainable autonomous technologies? Thankfully, the answer is yes. This last chapter of the preliminaries will provide the necessary context for all of us to answer that question more formally (or at least with hard evidence).

We will be relying on a few sources to understand the energy use of our building stock, namely:

• A paper by Pérez-Lombard, Ortiz, and Pout (2008) which discusses the building energy landscape as of 2008 using publicly available data at the moment.
• Chapter 1 from a new book by Murphy Jr (2021), which does some fun things to consider the growth of humanity’s energy demand.
• Reports by the Energy Information Administration, especially the Commercial Building Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS) and the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS).
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s energy flow charts for energy use in the United States.
• Chapter 4 from Harvey (2010), which discusses more detailed statistics about energy use of bulidings worldwide.

Harvey, Danny. 2010. Energy and the New Reality 1: Energy Efficiency and the Demand for Energy Services. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781849774918.

Murphy Jr, Thomas W. 2021. Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m.

Pérez-Lombard, Luis, José Ortiz, and Christine Pout. 2008. “A Review on Buildings Energy Consumption Information.” Energy and Buildings 40 (3): 394–98.