University of California, San Diego
OP-T2-14: Lighting Sensors

UC San Diego utilizes occupancy sensors in numerous buildings and offices throughout campus. UC San Diego is continuously looking for new energy efficient innovations to help reach climate goals. For example, the Computer Science and Engineering building has a sophisticated motion detection system. The Systems, Networking, and Energy Efficiency (Synergy) lab, which is part of the MESL lab at the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering led by Dr. Yuvraj Agarwal. Dr. Yuvraj Agarwal and his team have been dedicated to researching ways in which UC San Diego can save energy and reduce their carbon footprint. He has found that buildings on campus use a significant amount of energy from computer IT loads and heating and cooling (the HVAC system). Dr. Agarwal has been designing something he calls the Smart Building, which will require fine-grained occupancy sensing in order to control its own operations in an energy efficient manner. To that end Dr. Agarwal and his team have designed and created a Synergy Occupancy Sensor, which is a low cost wireless solution that can accurately track occupancy in an office building. This device is incorporated in the design of the Smart Building. The Synergy Occupancy Sensor data is interfaced with the building management system to allow for optimal control of HVAC and thus reduce energy usage in heating and cooling process.

http://sustainability.ucsd.edu/ http://synergy.ucsd.edu/research.html Much of UC San Diego’s campus consists of laboratory and medical facilities that cannot be controlled with lighting sensors.