Despite significant strides towards reducing energy consumption in the last decade, commercial and government organizations alike are facing escalating operating costs, according to Larry Melton, president and CEO of The Building People. So it seems reducing energy consumption alone is not enough. This, in a nutshell, is the business case behind investing in smart buildings, he said.
Speaking in a recent webinar, Melton, along with AgilQuest CEO John Vivadelli, shared how building owners, managers and operators can combine smart buildings and smart occupancy strategies to promote more productive people and more sustainable space.
The duo talked about smart occupancy and smart buildings in the context of four recent major trends: the sharing economy, worker mobility, the “Internet of Things” and big data.
The sharing economy refers to the sharing and monetizing of unused assets, Vivadelli says. For example, Airbnb allows homeowners to rent their residences while they are out of town. In the realm of commercial real estate, this means sharing underused space, and consolidating and selling off excess space.
Many organizations are failing to take advantage of increasing worker mobility.
“The traditional view of a portfolio is it’s discrete and disconnected,” Vivadelli says. “You’ve got the headquarters building, you’ve got home, and you’ve got third places like Starbucks and business suites.”
Instead, he says, the portfolio should be viewed as a network of connected and shared space.
That plays into the notion of the Internet of Things. Melton says that in practical terms, this means that “everything out there today, and in the future, is going to be connected to the Internet; everything will have its own IP address, just like your home address; everything will be connected remotely.”
Buildings should have an open, converged and normalized system that allows components to interact with one another in a network that generates data in unified format, he says.
And big data is the resulting and enormous amount of information being produced by these building systems, from HVAC to lighting to power, Vivadelli says. Smart buildings are about operationalizing — or being able to act on — that data in real time. This can be as simple as a motion sensor communicating with a smart occupancy system to cancel a booking in an unused conference room.
The United States General Services Administration (GSA) applied the principles of smart occupancy and smart buildings when four of its leases expired.
Vivadelli said that the GSA is currently accommodating 4,000 workers in 2,000 workspaces. The government agency had previously used more than 4,000 spaces to accommodate that same number of workers.
When workers are at home and decide to come into the office, they now use a smart occupancy system to select a place to go to work, he says. Location-based services in the smart-occupancy system communicate with the building system to identify when a worker checks in on-site, perhaps through digital signage or through the security system and turnstiles.
And, Melton adds, HVAC, lights and power systems are turned on via mobile app when the worker arrives, so those systems are operating on a per-person need.
At its 1800 F St. building in Washington, D.C, the GSA saved $24 million annually in reduced occupancy and real estate costs, Vivadelli says. That translated to savings of 16-million kilowatts in energy consumption, and a reduction of 16,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.
Melton says that this combination of technology and connectivity allows for one other important measurement to be made: per capita cost. And in the case of the GSA, that cost was determined to be $12,000 per workspace per year, according to Vivadelli.
“The one who dies with the most space does not win,” is how Melton sums up the lessons of the GSA case. “It’s not about having a big office, it’s not about having more space; it’s about utilizing it to maximum efficiency.”
Michelle Ervin is the editor of Canadian Facility Management & Design.
