Is Your Building Fueling Or Fighting Climate Change?
Throughout the last year, we’ve seen fires throughout Europe, flooding in the US and record-breaking heat waves across continents. And at the same time Europe is being hit with increasing energy costs due to global geopolitical changes while the pandemic continues to evolve and linger. With these types of headlines dominating the news and board rooms globally, we must all reconsider how our environments evolve and how both public and private sectors approach climate change.
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Buildings as Contributors to CO2 Emissions
Increased awareness of the contribution of the built environment to climate change is growing among c-suite executives and sustainability experts worldwide. It may surprise many that the building sector generates nearly 50% of annual global CO2 emissions and of that figure, building operations are responsible for 27% annually.1
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Armed with this knowledge of the severity of CO2 emissions from the built environment, we are given an unprecedented opportunity to decarbonize buildings and accelerate energy upgrades and efficiency and contribute to meeting ESG goals. I believe we can transform real estate with a focus on Smart IoT building technologies to meet long term sustainability goals, and at the same time we can improve human comfort and increase operational efficiencies. The time to act is now.
IoT Smart Building technology makes it possible to realize enormous savings in lighting, heating, and HVAC controls and make contributions to operating efficiencies and sustainability. With the latest restrictions in gas and oil, Germany announced in late August that public buildings will be limited to a maximum of 19 degrees Celsius/66.2 degrees Fahrenheit under legislation to save energy. I anticipate many more announcements like this to be made soon. So much more can be done by implementing smart and sustainable technologies and not simply turning down the thermostat.
A 5-Step Practical Approach to Building Sustainability
What is needed is a reasonable roadmap for building digitalization to achieve the financial and social goals with clear measurable outcomes, proven use cases and operational realism that can be used to model the path forward. These initiatives can appear complex and indeed there have been many unicorn examples where a company headquarters is outfitted with every conceivable automation technology, brought together after years of integration work and substantial budget. However, with a considered and phased strategy, early benefits and associated ROI can be achieved while establishing a future proofed environment for greater sustainability and data-based business decisioning.
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Such an approach can significantly reduce energy use, drive more efficient use of space and employ data to help achieve occupant well-being across diverse building portfolios. This has been proven to work across multiple space types, industries and geo locations to reduce CO2 emissions and drive towards ESG goals. A five-point plan for building digitalization can help achieve this, with a staged approach to success:
1. Begin with sensor-controlled lighting: Outfitting an entire building with a wireless smart sensor network provides the foundation for many occupant-controlled applications. The most impactful to achieve greater sustainability is software-controlled lighting, where configurations can take advantage of daylight harvesting, task tuning and other techniques to optimize lighting and reduce energy use without compromising on user experience.
2. Integrate occupancy-based temperature control: By Leveraging the same sensor grid, temperature can be modulated in real time based on occupancy and can even advantage opportunities for automated demand response programs.
3. Uplevel to select asset tracking applications: With the addition of long-life asset tags and badges, the same sensing environment from lighting can be used to track assets towards improved inventory management, movement analysis and theft control. These applications are typically leveraged in manufacturing, logistics and healthcare (think tracking forklifts and wheelchairs), but have applicability across multiple industries, especially for high-value assets.
4. Integrate more complex workflow improvements: The ability to identify movement of both assets and personnel via wearables (badges or wristbands) opens the possibility of measuring, managing and improving more complex workflows with enhanced employee safety, using the same lighting sensor grid. Understanding the interactions of assets and personnel tracking offers a powerful tool for redesigning activities for time savings, energy savings, speed to objectives and a myriad of other outcomes. Examples include designing a different process flow for patient throughput in healthcare, warehouse stocking logistics and improved worker safety in manufacturing.
5. Dive deep into robust IoT data analytics: An advantage of this phased approach is a wealth of time-series data collected from the same energy saving sensor grid. Occupancy trends, traffic patterns, use cases, time of day and time of week analysis can be produced that offer deep insights to drive better space decisions to inform space reductions in support of advancing CO2 reductions.
Achieving Short Term Impact with Future Based Possibilities
Digitalizing buildings to achieve sustainability goals can be daunting, especially during difficult economic circumstances where aggressive ROI analysis is required for every new proposed initiative. By taking a phased approached, building on the energy savings from a lighting and temperature environment as an initial step, the path to reaching ESG goals is shortened, while creating a runway on an even greater efficiency for building space.
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Enlighted, together with its parent company Siemens, has created the right building digitalization foundation based on a lighting control wireless grid network for over 1,000 global customers with real results of up to more than 90% energy savings, followed by deep data analytics and real time location services. Because of the rapidly changing landscape for building IoT, it’s important to partner with a provider whose technologies can be updated to scale both in data volumes and data types. By employing smart sensors with updatable firmware, a robust IoT platform to manage historical and massive data volumes and new technology partners, such as those found on the Siemens Xcelerator Marketplace, building digitalization can be augmented with additional functions over time.
Finding the balance to navigate difficult economic and climate circumstances while at the same time achieving stated sustainability goals is a challenge for most executives and requires bold leadership. An immediate action is to understand if your buildings are fueling or fighting climate change. And with the right approach, innovations that can grow with future needs and technologies with measurable outcomes, ESG goals can be achieved within reasonable time frames and financial frameworks.
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