Therese Peffer

• PhD
• University of California, Berkeley

The growing energy demand of the industrial sector and the need for sustainable solutions highlight the importance of efficient decision making in solar photovoltaic (PV) implementation. Selecting optimal PV configuration is complex due to the interdependent technical, economic, environmental, and social factors involved. This study introduces an i...

Given the uncertainty around climate change and the need to design systems that anticipate future needs, risks, and costs or values related to resilience, the current rules-based regulatory and policy frameworks designed for the centralized system of large-scale energy generation and delivery may not be ‘fit for purpose' for smaller scale local ins...

The evolution of cities to smart cities has demonstrated that the citizens’ quality of life is increased. Moreover, city planning follows an organized structure covering the citizens’ needs. This structure leads to generating smart communities. As a result, megacities based on smart communities can be developed. Communication systems that send and...

This chapter deals with the fundamental components that are used to build a smart house and building. This chapter also shows how smart homes and buildings are sensed and controlled. An intelligent house also has to improve the quality of life of seniors and handicapped people, so this chapter presents some strategies to achieve that goal.

Today’s cities have multiple networks and stakeholders tasked with meeting the district’s thermal and electrical demands, which is becoming an increasingly complex task. The Paris agreement and United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) necessitate sustainable solutions that improve energy efficiency while providing insight on strategic p...

Smart cities are based on decentralized units called communities. These communities have to move forward to supply the current and future needs of citizens, so they have to adapt their configuration in public spaces and indoor environments. This chapter presents how technology is helping to develop this reconfigurable smart city that can detect the...

The goal of this chapter is to illustrate how to model citizens using personality and behavior as well as a public social network. Besides, the role of serious games and gamification is presented in an entire strategy that includes AI methodologies that can model citizens for understanding their intrinsic and extrinsic needs and motivation factors...

This chapter shows the developed smart cities in the world as well as the conventional indicators used for classifying those. Besides, the proposed connected model for current smart cities is described. Thus, current smart cities worldwide are analyzed using this connected model. Finally, the future of connected citizens, communities, and cities is...

The intermediate layer between citizens and megacities is communities. These communities have to be constructed by generated citizen data: this middle layer receives and transmits information to re-configure the community and city according to the citizen’s requirements. Finally, a review of technologies developed to improve megacities.

This book illustrates how the advanced technology developed for smart cities requires increasing interaction with citizens to motivate and incentive them. Megacities' needs have been encouraging for the creation of smart cities in which the needs of inhabitants are collected using virtualization and digitalization systems. On the other hand, machin...

A smart city is a city that binds together technology, society, and government to enable the existence of a smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart living, smart people, and smart governance in order to reduce the environmental impact of cities and improve life quality. The first step to achieve a fully connected smart city is to st...

Residential buildings can contribute to save energy and to decrement electricity consumption in the world. On the other hand, the Internet of Things has allowed the implementation of smart homes that can profile the users. Nevertheless, end-users are not accepting the smart homes due to behavioral problems and usability problems with the Human–Mach...

A successful smart city implementation needs to efficiently use natural and human resources. This can be achieved by dividing the smart city into smaller modules, such as a smart community, and even smaller such as a smart home, to allow energy management systems to monitor the city's behavior. The electricity end-user sector is often divided into...

Deploying a smart city is becoming a trend toward achieving sustainability and enabling a better lifestyle for its inhabitants. Energy plays a leading role in smart cities, as most of our everyday activities and environment are related to energy sources. Integrating renewable energy into the electric power system is also challenging due to the inte...

Clothing garments directly affect the human body's thermal balance and thermal comfort. The ideal thermal balance is when the body's temperature remains neutral and the environment is not affecting it. Nevertheless, achieving that thermal balance is very unlikely due to other variables, such as humidity, that need consideration. Therefore, these va...

Energy-saving is a mandatory research topic since the growing population demands additional energy yearly. Moreover, climate change requires more attention to reduce the impact of generating more CO2. As a result, some new research areas need to be explored to create innovative energy-saving alternatives in electrical devices that have high energy...

Most large commercial buildings have digital controls for their heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) and lighting systems with the potential to implement advanced control strategies and data analytics. However, advanced control strategies and data analytics are rarely deployed at scale due to non-standard naming conventions and heterog...

In 2021, the residential sector had an electricity consumption of around 39% in México. Householders influence the quantity of energy they manage in a home due to their preferences, culture, and economy. Hence, profiling the householders’ behavior in communities allows designers or engineers to build strategies that promote energy reductions. The h...

Thermal comfort is associated with clothing insulation, conveying a level of satisfaction with the thermal surroundings. Besides, clothing insulation is commonly associated with indoor thermal comfort. However, clothing classification in smart homes might save energy when the end-user wears appropriate clothes to save energy and obtain thermal comf...

The residential Heating Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) system use around 3/5 of the total energy consumption. Connected thermostats optimize the HVAC operation; however, householders have personality traits that lead into behavioral and usability problems toward the thermostat’s interface usage. Thus, a serious game applied in the thermost...

Depression is a common mental illness characterized by sadness, lack of interest, or pleasure. According to the DSM-5, there are nine symptoms, from which an individual must present 4 or 5 in the last two weeks to fulfill the diagnosis criteria of depression. Nevertheless, the common methods that health care professionals use to assess and monitor...

Universities need to explore drastic changes regarding their facilities to be more inclusive and sustainable. Those changes must move forward to a Smart university campus. A Smart University Campus involves Smart City's concept because different socio-cultural aspects in the community and services like health care, public safety, mobility, educatio...

Today’s energy market is increasingly integrating time-varying tariffs, peak demand charges, and/or export tariffs. In this context, intelligent charging scheduling can considerably reduce the plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) charging cost. This is especially the case as more and more PEVs are charged in buildings that are also equipped with grid-con...

Residential energy efficiency decreases electricity consumption and saves energy worldwide. Moreover, 86% of the residential buildings use thermostats that control the Heating, Ventilation, and AirConditioning (HVAC) system. The energy consumption can decrease from 11% to 18% due to user behavior modifications accompanied by strategies such as feed...

A community and a city in terms of energy are composed of residential, commercial, industrial, and transportation sectors. Besides, standards as ISO 37120 provide indicators that determine if the community is having a sustainable and quality of life. The energy indicator is used in this paper to analyze the level of energy consumption. Another elem...

A smart city must be planned to efficiently manage its material and human resources to improve each citizen's quality of life. This paper proposes that the large amount of data generated daily by citizens could be collected, filtered, and processed by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) installed throughout several sectors in a smart city. However, it is...

Controlled air movement is an effective strategy for maintaining occupant comfort while reducing energy consumption, since comfort at moderately warmer temperatures requires less space cooling. Modern ceiling fans provide a 2–4 °C cooling effect at power consumption comparable to LED lightbulbs (2–30 W) with gentle air speeds (0.5–1 m/s). However,...

This chapter defines a smart community as a set of smart homes, commercial buildings, public spaces, and transportation with boundaries based on walking distance, located in a physical region. This smart community uses social products and provides community public services, smart water management, smart mobility management to promote social interac...

The most effective strategy for homes to save energy is by decreasing their electricity consumption. Home Energy Management Systems connect appliances that improve households' energy performance to thermal comfort. These systems need to take into account human behavior regarding saving energy and thermal comfort. This paper proposes a three-step fr...

A smart city is considered a sustainable city that manages needed resources and makes autonomous decisions to improve the quality of life of its citizens. On the other hand, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) have been implemented as isolated systems inside the city. For instance, the traffic lights, autonomous navigation for cars, and so on. Instead, co...

Nowadays, the growth in the consumption of energy and the need to face pollution resulting from its generation are causing concern for consumers and providers. Energy consumption in residential buildings and houses is about 22% of total energy production. Cutting-edge energy managers aim to optimize electrical devices in homes, taking into account...

Residential buildings can contribute to save energy and to decrement electricity consumption in the world. On the other hand, the Internet of Things has allowed the implementation of smart homes that can profile the users. Nevertheless, end-users are not accepting the smart homes due to behavioral problems and usability problems with the Human-Mach...

Reliable, non-intrusive, short-term (of up to 12 h ahead) prediction of a building's energy demand is a critical component of intelligent energy management applications. A number of such approaches have been proposed over time, utilizing various statistical and, more recently, machine learning techniques, such as decision trees, neural networks and...

Thermostats are now more often networked and embedded devices, as part of the Internet of Things, and thus considered "smart". These advanced thermostats enable demand response and use of heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment as distributed energy resources (DERs) towards a more resilient and effective utility grid. Topics of in...

Connected thermostats control the HVAC in buildings by adjusting the setpoint temperatures without losing the comfort temperature. These devices consider end user profiles, preferences, and schedules to reduce electrical energy consumption. However, users are reluctant to use connected thermostats due to behavior and usability problems with the int...

The user interface serves as a critical contact point between electronic devices and end-users. They aim to increase usability and optimize communicative relations between humans and machines. In this regard, theories related to human-computer interaction (HCI) stress the importance of interface design methods that consider needs, expectations, and...

The project goal was to identify and test the integration of smart ceiling fans and communicating thermostats. These highly efficient ceiling fans use as much power as an LED light bulb and have onboard temperature and occupancy sensors for automatic operationbased on space conditions. The Center for the Environment (CBE) at UC Berkeley led the res...

The ability to inexpensively monitor indoor air speed and direction on a continuous basis would transform the control of environmental quality and energy use in buildings. Air motion transports energy, ventilation air, and pollutants around building interiors and their occupants, and measured feedback about it could be used in numerous ways to impr...

Connected thermostats (CTs) often save less energy than predicted because consumers may not know how to use them and may not be engaged in saving energy. Additionally, several models perform contrary to consumers’ expectations and are thus not used the way they are intended to. As a result, CTs save less energy and are underused in households. This...

Over the years, the elderly people population will become more than children population; besides since 2018 people over 65 years old outnumbered the population under 5 years old. Growing up involves biological, physical, social and psychological changes that may lead to social isolation and loss of loved ones, or even to the sense of loss of value,...

Access to large amounts of real-world data has long been a barrier to the development and evaluation of analytics applications for the built environment. Open datasets exist, but they are limited in their span (how much data is available) and context (what kind of data is available and how it is described). Evaluation of such analytics is also limi...

The correct and continuous use of s³ products at home can be beneficial for the environment and at the same time could generate cost savings on bills. An automated home where the user has no interaction may be the most efficient and eco-friendly option, but it is not always the most comfortable option for the user. On the other hand, if the user in...

Indoor air movement affects many functions of buildings, including ventilation and air quality, comfort and health of occupants, fire safety, and building energy use. Accurately measuring air movement has been difficult and expensive over extended periods of time, especially for velocities below 1 m/s. A new type of high frequency ultrasonic transc...

Since Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, Digital Systems, Control Systems were incorporated in product design, a new designing technology era raised up so the conventional methods for developing products could not be valid anymore since they do not include social features that allow interacting with consumers and other products. Sometimes,...

Access to large amounts of real-world data has long been a barrier to the development and evaluation of analytics applications for the built environment. Open data sets exist, but they are limited in their span (how much data is available) and context (what kind of data is available and how it is described). Evaluation of such analytics is also lim...

It is well known that smart thermostats (STs) have become key devices in the implementation of smart homes; thus, they are considered as primary elements for the control of electrical energy consumption in households. Moreover, energy consumption is drastically affected when the end users select unsuitable STs or when they do not use the STs correc...

When an evaluation for detecting usability problems is conducted in low-cost thermostat interfaces, several usability problems can show up in one evaluation, and sometimes results are difficult to interpret to correct those problems. If an expert is not implementing, evaluating, and analyzing the test, part of the information could be lost. In addi...

Thermostats are designed for increasing requirements on indoor thermal comfort. Nevertheless, they are critical devices for saving energy in buildings and households. However, when thermostats do not accomplish the usability requirements, the end-users do not save energy. Then, when a thermostat is designed or validated, one of the leading problems...

One of the main problems for adopting smart thermostats is consumers’ expectations about smart thermostats. Generally, the interfaces in smart thermostats and smart devices in the energy market are designed without consideration for the expectations of the customers or are not adjusting their operation according to the consumers’ expectations and b...

Information technology can increase energy efficiency by improving the control of energy-using devices and systems. Awareness of this potential is not new—ideas for applications of information technology for energy efficiency have been promoted for more than 20 years. But much of the potential gain from the application of information technology has...

Abstract Programmable thermostats are generally sold as energy-saving devices controlling heating and cooling systems, but can lead to energy waste when not operated as designed by the manufacturers. We utilized Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online crowdsourcing service, to investigate thermostat settings and behavior in households. We posted a survey...

Unlabelled: Thermostats control heating and cooling in homes - representing a major part of domestic energy use - yet, poor ergonomics of these devices has thwarted efforts to reduce energy consumption. Theoretically, programmable thermostats can reduce energy by 5-15%, but in practice little to no savings compared to manual thermostats are found....

U.S. residential thermostats control approximately 9% of the nation's energy use. Many building codes now require programmable thermostats (PTs) because of their assumed energy savings. However, several recent field studies have shown no significant savings or even higher energy use in households using PTs compared to those using non-PTs. These stu...

This report investigates the history of thermostats to better understand the context and legacy regarding the development of this important tool, as well as thermostats' relationships to heating, cooling, and other environmental controls. We analyze the architecture, interfaces, and modes of interaction used by different types of thermostats. For o...

Residential thermostats have been a key element in controlling heating and cooling systems for over sixty years. However, today's modern programmable thermostats (PTs) are complicated and difficult for users to understand, leading to errors in operation and wasted energy. Four separate tests of usability were conducted in preparation for a larger s...

Electrical utilities worldwide are exploring "demand response" programs to reduce electricity consumption during peak periods. Californian electrical utilities would like to pass the higher cost of peak demand to customers to offset costs, increase reliability, and reduce peak consumption. Variable pricing strategies require technology to communica...

This poster presents latency and reliability characterization of wireless sensor network as applied to an advanced building control system for demand response energy pricing. A test network provided the infrastructure to extract round trip time and packet failure data. Latency was below the predicted 75 milliseconds per hop. Packet failure rates in...