RESIDE

Residential Building Energy Demand Reduction in India (RESIDE)

Project Year: 2017-2020

Funding Agency: DST-India

Principal Investigator: Dr. Vishal Garg

Co-Principal Investigator: Dr. Sachin Chaudhari

The Residential building energy demand reduction in India (RESIDE) is the sanctioned proposal for joint India-UK call on the Energy demand reduction in the Built Environment by Department of Science and Technology, India (DST) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, UK (EPSRC). The proposal involve academic collaboration between International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), and Malaviya National Institute of Technology, Jaipur (MNIT) from India and Oxford Brookes University (OBU), and University of the West of the England (UWE) from UK. The RESIDE project with 4-years duration will help support the improvement of living conditions for millions of Indian citizens through establishing the knowledge base to develop a residential code for high quality, low-energy housing across all five climatic zones in India. The aims of the project are:                                                         

  1.   Conduct analyses and synthesis of the existing and available residential energy and comfort datasets for India that are currently scattered in fragmented studies, and to engage with existing and prospective data users (government, academe, industry) to identify user needs, data gaps and how best to meet them through RESIDE field studies
  2.   Develop, customise, pilot and refine low-cost methods for monitoring and benchmarking of energy use and survey of thermal comfort in relation to the home indoor environment, in order to support the development of a rigorous Indian post occupancy evaluation regime
  3.   Establish a detailed picture of current residential energy demand patterns by undertaking a large-scale monitoring campaign of electricity use and indoor temperatures, alongside a field survey of household and property characteristics of 2000 dwellings (single-family/ multi-family) selected to represent the population (low/medium/high income) and housing stock (new-build/existing) across five geographically spread cities representing the five climatic zones of India
  4.   Design, trial, evaluate and refine a low-cost, easy-to-deploy smart home energy management (SHEM) system in order to enable residents to participate in overall energy saving and peak demand reduction (in response to (future) time varying tariffs), and to gather high-quality data characterising temporal load profiles of a subsample of 200 recently-built dwellings
  5.   Conduct post-occupancy evaluation studies of 200 recently-built dwellings across five housing developments in order to assess the physical and human factors that influence energy demand in dwellings, and identify which energy-using practices can be adapted for demand reduction
  6.   Build dwelling-level energy models of 10 residential archetypes to assess opportunities for substantial demand reduction by deploying, singularly and in combination, improved building envelope (insulation, shading), low-energy cooling/heating (passive solar, fans, radiant system) and behavioural measures (increasing set-point temperatures) for current and future climates
  7.   Create novel GIS-based community-level models to map 2000 dwellings across five cities to estimate and visualise energy demand in urban areas, and to predict potential for local demand reduction by targeting widespread deployment of energy saving measures and rooftop solar.
  8.   Develop and refine a data-driven residential energy code informed by adaptive thermal comfort and an outcome-based POE-lite tool for ensuring code compliance at scale, and investigate the policy implications of implementing the code through Delphi engagement methods involving both policymakers and practitioners in the Indian energy and built environment fields.

The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers, digital scientists, urban planners and behavioural researchers to assess all the aspects of the residential energy use problem, including performance of the building envelope fabric; in-home appliance including heating, ventilation and air conditioning; indoor environment and occupant behaviour.

R&D organisation and academic institutions

UK: Oxford Brookes University and University of the West of the England.

India: IIIT Hyderabad, MNIT Jaipur

Industry partners

ISHRAE, IGBC, Schneider Electric, Bosch, Barclays,  Unique Dream Builders, Hero Reality Private Limited, Fenesta, The Glass Academy

Outcomes from IIIT Hyderabad:

  1. Large-scale monitoring campaign and field survey using low-cost data collection:
    • Residential energy benchmarks (low/medium/high);
    • Curated and accessible data bank on residential energy demand, indoor temperature and contextual data. 
  2. Design, trial, evaluate and refine SHEMS for monitoring, disaggregating, communicating and managing electricity demand:
    • Refined Smart Home Energy Management Systems for wide-spread deployment and development of demand response policies;
    • Detailed residential load profiles.