Office Building Plug Load Disaggregation Reveals Energy Savings Opportunities

Today, smart plugs can meter and control devices and wirelessly report energy consumption to a central plug load management system. Smart plugs offer the potential for full building granular plug load monitoring. However, with thousands of devices in today’s large buildings, individually monitoring every plug load becomes a nontrivial task. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have attempted to address this issue by proposing a method for combining a limited amount of smart plug metering with a device inventory to develop a disaggregated breakdown of device-level power consumption in a zero energy office building.