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Page added on November 6, 2012
Smart and Sustainable Buildings
Buildings consume significant amounts of energy. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) in the Department of Energy (DOE) reported that buildings accounted for 72 percent of total U.S. electricity consumption in 2006 and this number will rise to 75% by 2025. This is split almost 50/50 between commercial and residential buildings.
Pre-recession, the ratio of new commercial building construction versus demolition was about 4:1. New buildings are generally more energy-efficient, and sometimes more sustainable than existing infrastructure. But are any buildings ready to take on new roles as active participants in the Smart Grid? For some answers, I spoke with Clay Nesler, Vice President of Global Energy and Sustainability for Johnson Controls to learn about their strategic perspectives on the role of commercial buildings in the Smart Grid. According to Nesler, Johnson Controls wants to “keep pushing to realize the opportunities and promises of the Smart Grid by increasing building intelligence and managing building performance over time.”
Like ships, buildings get “commissioned” to test that electrical, mechanical, plumbing, and other systems meet design intent and occupant requirements. Whole building commissioning ensures that buildings operate at their full design potential. But occupant numbers, functions, and operations can change over time. Building management objectives have changed over time too. Nesler has seen a shift from “once and done” commissioning to periodic “re-commissioning” and “ongoing commissioning” – similar to the continuous improvement processes embodied in quality management systems. Information and communications technologies (ICT) are critical to this commissioning trend– collecting and analyzing data from a variety of building and equipment systems to verify equipment integrity and optimize system performance.
New buildings often have this intelligence embedded into them, but existing building stock needs to be retrofitted to become more intelligent. This is a core business for Johnson Controls, which worked with Jones Lang Lasalle and the Rocky Mountain Institute to reduce energy consumption up to 38% in the venerable Empire State Building. But the retrofit business is more than improving energy consumption in buildings and prepping them for active Smart Grid-enabled participation – it’s making buildings themselves more sustainable. Nesler has a broad definition of building sustainability. It has to address “efficient use of resources such as energy, water, and materials; the quality of building environment and safety for occupants; and the impacts that the building has on the environment over its entire lifecycle.”
Building owners and managers understand the financial, environmental, and infrastructure impacts of energy and water consumption in their structures. In fact, the majority of their retrofit projects include water conservation as well as energy conservation. But the bottom line is still the decisive factor to the vast majority of building retrofit projects, with private sector projects seeking a 2-3 year payback whilst public enterprises can tolerate up to a 4-5 year payback. Financing innovations such as Energy Performance Contracts and PACE programs are gaining acceptance and expanding the investment pool and possibilities for more commercial building owners.
Energy Performance Contracts open up new project possibilities for public sector organizations across the country, leveraging private sector financing to make building improvements that are paid over time out of energy savings, and extending guaranteed payback periods to 10-15 years. Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs for commercial buildings are also gaining traction in the market as innovative financing instruments that allow building improvements to be paid over time through an assessment on the property bill. This allows investment in longer term improvement measures and solves many of the classic financing problems like alignment of owner/tenant incentives, transfer of financing to new owners and providing security to 3rd party lenders. That’s extremely welcome news – because reducing the ongoing operating costs for energy and water increases property value and frees that capital for other sustainability projects. And making buildings smarter in their consumption and their levels of integration to the electrical, gas, and water grids helps accelerate the benefits that the Smart Grid delivers. Johnson Controls has an initiative called the Institute for Building Efficiency that contains information about financing building retrofits, smart buildings, and more. It’s a worthwhile site to gain knowledge about the critical roles buildings will play in delivering on the promises of the Smart Grid.
4 Comments on "Smart and Sustainable Buildings"
actioncjackson on Wed, 7th Nov 2012 12:56 am
Let’s focus on anything but the real problem, oil, because it’s unsolvable.
BillT on Wed, 7th Nov 2012 3:37 am
The fact that most of these buildings will be abandoned in the next 20 or so years is not mentioned. They are still building condo towers here in Manila by the dozens. Millions of barrels of oil in each one. And when oil is gone, these towers will be the home of rats, roaches and weeds.
When will this happen? Well, doubt it will take more than 20 years at best. A collapse of the economy worldwide would bring many of these projects to a screeching halt. They are being paid for by off shore workers sending money home to purchase them for future living.
Problem is…how do you feed, and supply 18,000,000 people daily when there is no oil to fuel the trucks? How do they survive when the corporations close their offices? How does any city survive when the plug is pulled on the financial system that supports them?
Answer: They don’t. It does not matter if it is Manila, LA, NYC, London, Dubai, or Singapore. All will go away when oil goes.
DC on Wed, 7th Nov 2012 4:47 am
Q/ New buildings are generally more energy-efficient, and sometimes more sustainable than existing infrastructure.
Really? In fact, most are often neither. Newer building are often even more poorly and flimsily constructed than older ones, which are nothing to write home about about either. Contractors of course love to tell people they are making buildings more efficient, but in reality, they are just making them as cheaply as possible, while still charging as much as they can get away with. Efficiency, is more of a marketing term than a concrete reality. And dont dont have ’embedded intelligence’ whatever that tripe is supposed to mean. A Cat-5 jack and wire in the walls is not ‘intelligent’ anything, anymore than phone wiring is.
This article all but admits its mostly futile trying to make something that was never designed efficently in the first, more so. Yes it is possible and desirable to do so, but its also very expensive and time consuming. Few can afford to properly retro-fit there leaky buildings, and even fewer can do the job properly. Its like cars, inherently inefficient objects, cannot easily be more efficient Slightly less wasteful at high cost if often the best result you can hope for. No wonder so few do it.
BillT on Wed, 7th Nov 2012 8:31 am
Correct DC. My career was in construction from homes to mega malls. They are ALL constructed to minimum standards and as cheap as possible to maximize profit in the short term. Most will fall apart in less than 20 years without constant maintenance.