Is 2020 the Year of the Smart Building?
As experts gather in Orlando for the AHR Expo, described as the Super Bowl of HVAC, it seems the right time to examine how Smart and Connected Buildings are growing as a highly impactful segment of Smart Community efforts across the globe.
According to a recent forecast from MarketsandMarkets, the Smart Building sector will grow from $60 billion in 2019 to more than $100 billion by 2024. In this post, I outline the three forces that will help drive growth in the sector in 2020 and beyond.
· New regulations and attractive incentives
· emerging trends and
· compelling technologies and applications
I make the case that — when combined with the new regulations and emerging industry trends — the availability of applications that make less costly and more effective the retro-commissioning of buildings should result in a dramatic increase in the number digitized buildings that employ smart and connected technologies.
Regulations and Incentives: Attractive Carrots and New Sticks
As of January 2019, more than 27 cities have implemented building energy benchmarking ordinances. In 2019, Seattle and Philadelphia became the first American cities to enact Building Tune-up policies, requiring office buildings 50,000 square feet and larger to submit a certification of high energy performance to the City or conduct a tune-up to bring existing building energy systems up to a state of good repair.
Also last year, Washington DC passed the Clean Energy Omnibus Act, a law mandating energy use improvements across a wide range of existing buildings and New York City passed Local Law 97 requiring building owners to achieve a certain level of performance with hefty fines for those who do not comply. Building owners are expected to begin investing in the solutions — in many cases IoT-enabled solutions employing connected sensors and advanced analytical tools — that will ensure that their buildings meet or exceed the requirements set-forth in these new laws and ordinances to avoid penalties.
In addition to regulations, governments and regulatory bodies have created incentive programs that encourage and reward organizations that make improvements in building performance and/or increase demand for clean, renewable energy. Dozens of states have such programs. A website administered by the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center provides building owners and their partners with a searchable list of thousands of incentive programs.
Emerging Real Estate Industry Trends: Digitizing Buildings and Deploying GreenTech in Buildings
Observers of the real estate industry suggest that the so-called moneyball effect is having a significant impact industry. A recent report by the management consulting firm Deloitte concludes that “Data is the New Gold” in the real estate business. Successful building owners have satisfied occupants in well-run buildings. The report notes that, increasingly, digitizing buildings, accessing building data and effective analysis of building data provides building owners with valuable insights about their building’s occupants and their building’s systems. The insights are among the keys to ensuring a building is well run and its occupants are satisfied.
More than 2,000 businesses and investors have signed the We are Still In pledge committing to meet or exceed the carbon-reduction goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. In the City of Washington DC, buildings are responsible for 74% of the city’s carbon emissions. Real estate owners are paying attention. Observers have noted that Moody’s recent purchase of a climate data firm illustrates that real estate owners and investors are increasingly aware of — and interested in measuring — climate risks. Notable projects in locations as different as New York City and Hoover, Alabama illustrate that home builders and real estate portfolio owners are pursuing innovative — “GreenTech” — approaches to reducing carbon emissions in the built environment.
Compelling Technology: Data-Centric Applications for Retro-Commissioning Buildings
Retro-commissioning (”RCx”) is a process designed to ensure that existing systems within a building operate optimally and efficiently. Through a retro-commissioning process, problems that occurred during design and problems that have developed throughout a building’s life are resolved. Typically, RCx involves adjustments to the HVAC controls programming, schedules and set-points of various systems in the buildings. As an automobile benefits from regularly scheduled tune-ups, so does a building benefit from retro-commissioning.
Data acquired from critical building systems is a key input in an effective RCx process. Using connected sensors and advanced analytics, new applications and technology can monitor building performance in real-time. Access to building data and management of building data is so important that many smart and connected buildings include a new data-centric system — an Energy Management & Information System (EMIS). The Smart Energy Analytics Campaign makes available a list of states where there are incentive programs for EMIS deployments.
Fortune 100 company, Comcast, is utilizing its MachineQ technology to do monitor energy and operations its buildings, data centers and laboratories. Because the MachineQ technology supports a wireless technology, monitoring a building’s energy and operations does not require the installation of new wiring or expensive hardware. As Comcast’s Director of Sustainability — Energy and Technology notes in a 2019 blog about the technology deployment, the MachineQ deployment has the very real capability to disrupt the way organizations have previously operated buildings.
Year of the Smart Building?
Notable for the purposes of this blog, deployments like Comcast’s use of MachineQ for real-time energy usage monitoring bring into alignment the goals of new municipal regulations and the emerging trends within the Real Estate industry to digitize buildings, meet the needs of occupants using data and deploy GreenTech to improve efficiency and reduce carbon emissions.
Though my crystal ball is admittedly cloudy, I predict that new regulations, the thirst for data and compelling GreenTech technologies will drive more and more building owners to deploy systems affording them access to their building’s operations and energy data. In so doing, they will be taking an important first step towards transforming their buildings into Smart and Connected Buildings and helping forge smarter more sustainable communities. Indeed, I see 2020 as the year the Smart Building starts to go mainstream.
About this Medium Site
On this Medium site, I intend to explore an array of topics related to the transformative power of smart and connected communities. A central question for this observer of the so-called smart city movement: how will municipalities develop, deploy and support smart and connected community projects at scale?
I welcome feedback and comments from readers.
