MicroclimateWatch_The secret to office energy conservation? Costas
Spanos thinks you should track your workers and
hand over the lights and thermostat to AI.
RENEW
BYGregory Barber PHOTOGRAPH BYCayce CliffordTHE FOUNDER OF MODERN SINGAPORE,
Lee Kuan Yew, once credited his nation’s
phenomenal economic growth to two
factors: multiethnic tolerance and AC. “Air-
conditioning was a most important invention
for us,” he told an interviewer in 2009. “It
changed the nature of civilization by making
development possible in the tropics.”
Today the tropics are projected to house
around half of the world’s population by
2050, and burgeoning cities there often look
to Singapore as a model. Some leaders in
the island nation realize that this vast equa-
torial building boom poses certain risks: If
AC systems hum all day long, cooling half-
used rooms, that’s a recipe for climate disas-
ter. Which is why Singapore has enlisted
the help of Costas Spanos, a wiry, intense
electrical engineering and computer sci-
ence professor at UC Berkeley who thinks
he can cut office energy use by half—with
the help of artificial intelligence.
Recently, the Singaporean government
offered Spanos a floor in an office building to
renovate. After he finished in January, work-
ers returned to an unassuming new interior
evoking the aesthetics of a hip budget airline.
The room had been packed with tiny sensors
detecting humidity, light, temperature, and
C0 2 concentration; Spanos had also devised a
way to use Wi-Fi to triangulate people’s loca-
tions by detecting their phones as they move
through space. The theory: Armed with that
anonymized data, the system would learn the
workers’ movements, schedules, and prefer-
ences and tweak their environment to suit.
If the workers got too hot or too cold, they
could tap an app to say so. The AI would
adapt, creating microclimates to reflect their
feedback. But in time, Spanos expected, the
workers wouldn’t bother. His goal is to make
the system forgettable. Lights will turn on as
workers come and go; screens will flicker to
life as they settle at their desks. Then the sys-
tem will nudge for even more energy savings.
The lights might get a bit dimmer, the room
a little warmer, trying to fly under the radar
of the workers’ awareness.