This whitepaper attempts to summarize and provide a structured perspective on transforming India’s built environment, taking stock of emerging realities attributed to climate change and sustainability (planet, people, and prosperity). While the COVID-19 pandemic provided the original backdrop to review the status of the built environment and its resilience, climate change continues to manifest as an existential threat. While the COVID-19 pandemic provided the original backdrop to review the status of the built environment and its resilience, climate change continues to manifest as an existential threat. We attempt to summarize and provide a structured perspective on transforming India’s built environment, taking stock of emerging realities attributed to climate change and sustainability (planet, people, and prosperity). Three interdependent, concurrent drivers, Decarbonize, Democratize, and Digitalize are essential for the required transformations in the built environment. Decarbonization aims to drop the exponentially accruing carbon footprint attributed to modern society to fundamentally restore and reset planetary systems that society is attuned to.Democratization aims to overcome deprivation and marginalization, to be inclusive of diversity in culture, geography, and aspirations in providing a healthy and resilient living environment. Digitalization could provide the ubiquitous digital connectivity and Internet of Things as the unifying fabric encompassing environmental stewardship to network, facilitate, operate, and underscore transformations across all seven sectors in the built environment, viz., residential, agriculture, administration, industry & commerce, education & research, infrastructure services, and transport and communication. Decarbonize, Democratize and Digitalize, like in a triple helix, are intricately linked, and may be achieved through five actionable levers: Research and Development, Technology, Human Capital, Policy and Economic Investment. This structure aims to support wellness and resilience in the built environment and restore planetary stability. Wellness provides the much-needed paradigm to unify the outcomes emerging from the seven built-environment sectors. Clarity needs to emerge on the definition and assessment of wellness and sustainability, as it would apply to various activities and stakeholders, to achieve carbon neutrality. There is an imminent need for restoring ecosystem services and enhancing biodiversity. Wellness as a fundamental right permeates all aspects of the built and natural environment and the planet. The built environment (urban to be specific) also needs to be reconfigured keeping in mind human scale and socio-temporal sensitivity, e.g. open spaces, pedestrian mobility, social inclusiveness, nature and recreation. In addition to equitable and affordable access to a healthy living environment, meeting inter-generational aspirations is crucial. This white paper has taken stock of current status and challenges in the built environment while also identifying multi-sectoral recommendations at the building, community and regional/national scales. Each of the three drivers has been articulated in detail, highlighting challenges and opportunities in terms of market barriers, policy and institutional challenges, and societal saliency. Decarbonization approaches include reduction in embodied and operational carbon and circularity of materials, products and spaces. Democratization approaches include provision of inclusive, healthier built environments and communities, resilience to unprecedented health and climate risks, and reinforcing positive sustainable behavior. Digitalization approaches include all stages of building lifecycle, community-scale systems, and unlocking region-specific transformations. This involves a national computing and networking infrastructure, archiving and revival of traditional knowledge, and adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence based analytics for the built environment. At the UN Climate Change Conference 2021, India announced a target of net zero emissions by 2070. India will reduce its projected Carbon emissions by 1 billion tonnes and the carbon intensity of its economy by 45% by 2030. In order to approach, and as we believe, surpass this target, it is absolutely critical to transform the built environment that constitutes nearly 40% of global energy-related GHG emissions. While other energy sectors such as centralized renewables may require significant infrastructure change and investment, building technologies can create quick climate wins. In India where half of the buildings and homes that will be standing in 2050 have yet to be built, but once built will last 50-100 years, this is a historic opportunity. It is also a contrast to decarbonizing sectors such as transport where the assets are short lived. The built environment thereby lends itself to democratization and faster adoption as one of the most cost effective and deep carbon abatement wedges while being the human theater for wellness and health. Ten key considerations have been identified along the three drivers with a vision of a zero-carbon built environment promoting digitally-enabled equitable wellness and resilience for all.

The U.S.-India Joint Center for Building Energy Research & Development (CBERD), created through the Partnership to Accelerate Clean Energy (PACE) agreement between the United States and India, is a research and development (R&D) center with over 30 institutional and industry partners from both nations. This five-year presidential initiative is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Government of India. CBERD aims to build upon a foundation of collaborative knowledge, tools, and technologies, and human capabilities that will increase development of high-performance buildings. To reach this goal, the R&D focuses on energy use reduction throughout the entire life cycle of buildings—i.e., design, construction, and operations. During the operations phase of buildings, even with best-practice energy-efficient design, actual energy use can be much higher than the design intent. Every day, much of the energy consumed by buildings serves no purpose (Roth et al. 2005). Building energy information systems (EIS) are commercially available systems that building owners and facility managers use to assess their building operations, measure, visualize, analyze, and report energy cost and consumption. Energy information systems can enable significant energy savings by tracking energy use, identifying consumption patterns, and benchmarking performance against similar buildings, thereby identifying improvement opportunities. The CBERD team has identified potential energy savings of approximately 2 quads of primary energy in the United States, while industry building energy audits in India have indicated potential energy savings of up to 30 percent in commercial buildings such as offices. Additionally, the CBERD team has identified healthcare facilities (e.g., hospitals, clinics), hotels, and offices as the three of the highest-growth sectors in India that have significant energy consumption, and that would benefit the most from implementation of EIS.

A significant buildings energy reduction opportunity exists in the office sector, given that this market segment typically is an early adopter of new technology. There is a rising trend towards smart and connected offices through the internet of things (IoT) that provides new opportunities for operational efficiency and environmental sustainability practices. Leading commercial real estate companies have begun to shift from individual building automation systems (BAS) to partially integrated and automated systems such as energy information systems (EIS). In both the United States and India, organizations are seeking operational excellence, enhanced tenant relationships, and topline growth. Hence it is imperative to engage the executives with decision-making power, by tapping into their interest in sustainability, corporate social responsibility, and innovation. This expansion of interest can enable data-driven decisions, strong energy investments, and deeper energy benefits, and would drive innovation in this field. However, none of this would be possible without robust, consistent building energy information to provide visibility across all the levels of decision making, i.e. from the basement where the facilities staff take operational action to the boardroom where the executives make investment decisions. Price, security, and ease of use remain barriers to the adoption and pervasive use of promising EIS technologies in commercial office buildings. We believe that these barriers can be addressed through the development of ready, simplified, consistent, commercially available, low-cost EIS-in-a-box packages, that have a pre-defined set of hardware components and software features and functionality that are pertinent to a particular building sector. These simplified, sector-specific EIS packages can help to obviate the need for customization, and enhance ease of use, thereby enabling scale-up, in order to facilitate building energy savings. The EIS-in-a-box are adaptable in both U.S. and Indian office buildings, and potentially beyond these two countries.

As data science comes to buildings, the promise of using machine learning and novel sources of data has received much attention. Advances in machine learning and computer vision algorithms, combined with increased access to unstructured data (e.g., images and text), have created an opportunity for automated extraction of building characteristics – cost-effectively, and at scale. Acquisition of features such as footprint are time consuming and costly to acquire with today’s manual methods, but can be streamlined through intelligent software-based solutions applied to satellite images. When combined with aerial RGB and thermal images, full 3D geometries and thermal maps can be constructed to determine additional characteristics such as window to wall ratio, height, number of stories and envelope thermal characteristics. In this paper we present three contributions to accelerate these high potential opportunities: (1) a methodical analysis of how these features can be integrated into today’s simulation and data driven software tools to enhance efficiency measure identification and owner/operator decision making; (2) development and accuracy testing of open source deep neural network methods to extract building footprints from satellite imagery, including the curation and application of openly available GIS datasets for training and continued development by others; and (3) an open framework for drone-based image capture and creation of 3D building geometries. This work represents an important bridge between high-level studies that span diverse application areas and those that detail point solutions yet cannot be easily replicated or extended.

Community and city leaders are interested in achieving sustainability goals, providing resilient energy infrastructure, and improving economic competitiveness. Community-level data acquisition and analysis can provide energy and associated benefits that are not possible at the single building level. However, there is a lack of organizational structure, common semantic data models, interoperable systems, and methods to support data-driven decision-making for community-scale energy supply and demand systems. We explored the need and opportunity for a Community Energy Operations and Planning System (Community EOPS), a potential data exchange platform. We conducted “customer discovery” interviews, and reviewed literature, public tools, and technology platforms to identify key energy data “users” and use cases in communities. The key users of the Community EOPS could be developers of mixed-use districts, corporate, defense and university campus energy managers, and city managers of cities that own their energy utility. The value could be for community planning and reporting (for energy data-integrated land use planning and community infrastructure investments in microgrids, storage, district heating and cooling), energy efficiency (leveraging optimizations for community scale energy supply and demand), flexible load management (grid-edge load management to offset, shift, and flatten loads for multiple buildings and EV fleets), cost savings and revenue generation (participating in grid services), and social benefits such as energy resilience, equity, and awareness. We developed a conceptual Community EOPS architecture with recommendations for streamlined and prioritized data acquisition, sharing, and integration driven by prioritized use cases, common metrics, and actionable visualizations that can provide value to a community’s users.