The global ‘green revolution’ can easily extend to ICT infrastructure, and the benefits can be numerous. David Yip explains.

Buildings consume 42% of the world’s electricity, the most of any asset class, in fact even more than transportation or industry. Alarmingly still is that 50% of this electricity is wasted, despite many years of companies executing energy and facilities management programs.

By 2025, buildings will be the largest emitters of greenhouse gases on our planet.

In Australia today, buildings are responsible for 26% of our greenhouse gas emissions and are the primary cause of peak energy demand on our electricity networks.

But, why is this the case and how can we address the problem?

Building systems have been typically designed, built and commissioned based on historical data and patterns – essentially they have been set up to manage the past. Furthermore, many legacy building systems were built with proprietary technologies and communication protocols that inhibit the interconnection of systems from different vendors. The result is systems set up and managed independently, operating in silos. Many of them are not managed at all for occupancy, energy use or thermal effect, due to a lack of the sensors and monitors required to achieve this.

The lack of standards for measuring energy use and carbon footprints isolates buildings’ systems from each other and makes it harder to implement practices that can control and manage energy use. The lack of standard interfaces across the wide range of devices and systems in a building makes centralised management of them nearly impossible.

A ‘smart building’ interacts with its internal and external environment, enabled through instrumentation – installed sensors that monitor everything from motion, temperature, humidity, precipitation, occupancy, light and many other environmental and operational parameters. The data collected from these sensors are then interconnected to systems that manage the building’s resources to ensure the comfort and security of its occupants. With advanced and predictive analytics, the interconnected systems can provide intelligence to enable building owners and tenants to make better decisions about how they use the building’s resources. For example, such smarter systems can help to reduce the building’s energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

A portfolio of interconnected smart buildings can extend those benefits even further – sharing information and resources that reduce the building’s carbon footprint, decrease costs and provide tenants with a better place to work or live. There is a growing interest in these types of technologies. According to a new report from Lux Research, the market for energy saving green buildings technologies will expand from $144 billion today to $277 billion in 2020, representing a 6.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

THE BENEFITS OF BEING SMART

Typically buildings incorporate many individual systems, including ones which manage energy, lighting, fire detection and protection, security and access, water and waste, HVAC, mobility such as elevators or escalators, telecommunications and ICT. Each system typically has its own sensors, cabling and network, and management system.

By interconnecting and integrating these disparate systems, starting with a common network and open, standards-based communications protocol, smart building technologies can help organisations save up to 30% of water use, 40% of energy use, 30% of building maintenance cost. In fact, four out of five of the largest property owners report that smart buildings achieve a 2.5% increase in property value for every dollar invested in energy improvement.

As an example, IBM selected a large campus facility in Rochester, Minnesota, US to pilot our ‘Smarter Buildings’ initiative. The site selected was over 50 years old, our 7th highest energy consuming location and consisted of a number of different space types, including office, data centre, manufacturing plant, hardware and software labs, and a warehouse. Importantly, it was one that was already very well run – in fact, as a result of numerous energy efficiency initiatives carried out over the preceding 10 years, the site had actually exceeded its energy management targets. Hence it was an ideal site to pilot smart building technologies to see how interconnecting systems can further improve already efficient infrastructure.

Like many building managers, IBM’s traditional approach to energy management had been to optimise individual pieces of equipment for maximum energy efficiency. However, in this pilot, we added a layer of IBM software and analytics technology above existing third party building management systems. By taking an integrated approach, we are able to gain insights from the interconnected data sources and see things we were previously not able to see, resulting in a further 8% energy saving through optimising the total system. The main improvement areas that this approach identified included:

> Set point calibration deviations.

> Excessive energy usage.

> Simultaneous heating and cooling.

SMART INITIATIVES

For a new building, consider implementing a single high capacity data cabling network and converge traditionally disparate and proprietary networks onto an open, standardised communications solution and encourage the interconnection of building systems and sharing of data.

For an existing building, consider supplementing or upgrading existing systems with a common communications interface, and encourage the interconnection of disparate building systems and sharing of data.

In an office environment, artifi cial space lighting can be fi tted with dimmers and sensors to detect occupancy as well as available natural light from nearby windows and adjust light intensity to suit.

In another office example, optimising the HVAC system can be achieved by installing temperature and humidity sensors, occupancy sensors, external weather sensors, as well as HVAC performance and coordination devices to all units that enable continuous adjustment of capacity and system performance to optimise occupant comfort with energy effi ciency. This enables the system to take advantage of free cooling when external conditions permit, as well as avoid wasting energy from simultaneous heating and cooling of fi ghting adjacent HVAC units.

Optimising ICT facilities (server rooms and data centres) and energy effi ciency in commercial buildings is also important, as these facilities often have the highest energy density in the building. Compared to a general office fl oor, a server room is typically 10-30x more energy intensive, and also has the greatest improvement potential when incorporating the latest ‘Green Data Centre’ design approaches and technologies. A good place to start is to undertake a NABERS self assessment, using the newly launched NABERS for Data Centre ratings standard and guide, to identify optimisation areas.

CONCLUSION

The building management industry and IT world have just started to converge, albeit still in its infancy stages. A few progressive companies are already embracing this trend and implementing smart building technologies, and reaping wide ranging business benefits – from reduced energy costs, to higher occupant productivity, through to increased property asset value. These are exciting times as a new era for building operations opens up, and presents many opportunities for the industry to collaborate and build ecosystems that leverage complementary capabilities, competencies and experiences to address the broad array of environmental challenges and effi ciency opportunities across the entire enterprise.

With an estimated one million people around the world moving into cities each week, new urban growth is driving demand for buildings and energy use. This means many more opportunities for buildings to play a bigger part in a smarter planet — a system of systems that tells us what we can do better, both inside and outside of the building.