The building automation and controls industry sits at the nexus of a building’s solar arrays and its microgrid, as well as at the seat of its transactive energy potential with neighboring microgrids. Automation and control frameworks built upon open architectures have emerged as clear winners among building owners because they allow data to be pulled … Continue reading Navigating the New Landscape of Energy Efficiency, Renewables and Microgrids
Tag: Building Automation
For Gourmet Tenant Experiences, Mix Sensor Data and an Open Tech Stack
by Simon Troup, Head of Data Services, OpenSensors.io Expect the early adopters of ‘enchanted’ buildings to be our employers. The World Green Building Council estimates that we spend 10% of our costs on facilities management and 90% on executing our business. You don’t have to be an accountant to realise a 1% improvement in productivity trumps … Continue reading For Gourmet Tenant Experiences, Mix Sensor Data and an Open Tech Stack
Building Controls Beyond Protocol Wars
by Greg Shank, Principal, Altura Associates Does the next phase in building controls have to take on the dynamic of Betamax vs. VHS or Android vs. iOS? First, let’s acknowledge that commercial buildings are a different beast than the consumer marketplace, so analogies to video equipment and smartphones are limited. The goal of this little exercise … Continue reading Building Controls Beyond Protocol Wars
Buildings IoT Architectures and Examples
“Hats Off” to the Realcomm team and to the Intelligent Buildings industry that they represent. They nailed the architecture for the Buildings Internet of Things (B-IoT) about 24 months before the big IT brands at the core of the IIC — Cisco, Intel, IBM, GE — offered theirs. Read my posts on the IIC reference architecture … Continue reading Buildings IoT Architectures and Examples
As Goes the Work, So Goes the Workplace
These images from the 1960 movie 'The Apartment" capture the office productivity tools typical of the era. Tech analyst Ben Evans pointed me to them in his article Office, messaging and verbs. One of today's smart phones could replace all of those desktop machines and many of the machine operators too. Ben's whole post reinforces a point he … Continue reading As Goes the Work, So Goes the Workplace
A New Energy Management System
A single, integrated engineering team should collaborate on all software programming and optimization tasks - controls, analytics, and workflow management - during design and construction. The resulting data platform can evolve into a building energy management system that will serve the building’s on-going commissioning needs through its useful life. by Greg Shank, Principal, Altura Associates … Continue reading A New Energy Management System
Buildings IoT Industry Gives Industrial Internet Consortium Something to Reference
On June 17th the Industrial Internet Consortium, with companies like Cisco, Intel, GE and IBM at the core, formally released its IoT Reference Architecture Document, making it available for complementary download. When I wrote about the first public showcasing of the reference model at the IoT World Forum in Chicago in October, the resulting BuildingContext post was … Continue reading Buildings IoT Industry Gives Industrial Internet Consortium Something to Reference
Vibrant Ecosystem Ups the Value of a Buildings IoT Platform
Note: At the Realcomm/IB-Con conference in San Antonio, an industry insider commented to me "BASSG has really got 'the secret sauce' for Buildings IoT. But, not a lot of people understand all that they do yet." Soon after the conference, I got a call from BASSG's Alper Uzmezier and he filled me in. Now I concur, the gears would … Continue reading Vibrant Ecosystem Ups the Value of a Buildings IoT Platform
Across the Chasm?
Has support for standardization efforts like BACnet and Project Haystack naming/tagging taxonomy grown to the point that it is providing a pathway for data-driven building operations technologies across the Chasm? It feels like our industry is moving into a higher gear. So to think through the shifting momentum, I took out my Crossing the Chasm … Continue reading Across the Chasm?
How DC Does Building Analytics
by Terry Herr, Intellimation In a densely populated metro like the City of Washington DC, heating and cooling buildings consumes the most energy and makes the largest contribution to greenhouse gas (GHG ) emissions. DC’s built environment contributes 75% of all its GHG emissions, which is almost double the national average of 38%. In 2013, … Continue reading How DC Does Building Analytics
Building Context 