Growing greener buildings with automation: the seeds are being sown with GridWise, LEED®, the CABA Intelligent & Integrated Buildings Council, and others

Engineered Systems, August, 2005 by Ken Sinclair

Growing greener buildings is not a new concept.

In September 2003, I presented a paper at the Worldwide CIBSE/ASHRAE gathering of the building services industry in Edinburgh, Scotland. The conference addressed the issue of delivering sustainable buildings while remaining profitable and delivering value to clients.

My paper was titled "The Greening of Buildings with Computerized Web Enabled Automation," and an excerpt follows:

"Opportunities arrive daily to intelligently use building automation as more than just a connector of 'brute force' comfort generation systems. To realize this renaissance, the building automation industry must become part of the globally expanding green building movement and show how improved occupant/architectural interaction can enhance environment-friendly buildings. [By] Using evolving automation, we can bring passive designs alive with the necessary missing ingredient 'intelligent interaction.'

"The low energy impact of the original raw materials required to create the building automation systems, coupled with their potential power creates the greenest of all building materials. Automation's capability to provide significant change with only grams of substance, and the inherent ability to be easily reconfigured to grow and adapt with the building makes it the essential backbone of leading green building design. Web-enabled building automation takes us to a higher level of interactive communication with the architectural fabric."

THE HEAVY HITTERS

So, what are the new opportunities that are arriving to allow us to intelligently use building automation? I predict that GridWise[TM] (http://www.gridwise.org) will become the killer application for building automation, making all large buildings part of the electrical grid.

The GridWise Alliance is a consortium of public and private stakeholders who have joined together in a collaborative effort to provide real-world technology solutions to support the DOE's vision of a transformed national electric system. It is an electric system that will employ new distributed "plug and play" technologies using advanced telecommunications, information, and control approaches to create a society of devices that function as an integrated transactive system. GridWise refers to the national electricity system, information technology, networking, and the Internet. GridWise is an initiative to stimulate development and adoption of an intelligent energy system that enables more effective use of the U.S. electric system. This will result in significant opportunities for energy efficiency, but of equal importance it can result in a more reliable electric grid.

GridWise is the first of many automation strategies that will extend building automation beyond the building envelope to the community, and even to the nation and beyond.

What else?

The LEED[R] green building rating system, (http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/LEEDdocs/LEED_RS_v2-1.pdf), version 2.1, was promulgated to improve the environmental and economic performance of new and existing commercial, institutional, and high-rise residential buildings. This standard has many parts providing credits for intelligent use of automation, but the building automation industry has much work to do to show our true capabilities.

The acceptance of many new communication and computerized concepts has radically changed the function of our large buildings. Office hotelling has allowed the sharing of expensive office buildings with an increased number of telecommunicating occupants. To manage this phenomenon effectively, coordination of everything is required, such as personal environment, phones, workstations, data links, security access, etc. Occupants also must have the ability to interact with their environment virtually. The greenest of buildings extends beyond shared office space; it includes sharing the total transportation and support infrastructures while making our residential interface more efficient.

WHAT ARE SOME OTHER RESOURCES?

The CABA IIBC. The Continental Automated Buildings Association (CABA) Intelligent & Integrated Buildings Council (IIBC) provides a significant resource and works to strengthen the large building automation industry through innovative technology-driven research projects.

"The IIBC is extremely pleased that both private and public sectors are actively supporting the completion of the integrated automation life cycle cost tool," said Tom Lohner, vice president of TENG Solutions and IIBC chairman. "The task force has put significant effort in the development of the life cycle cost model. These contributions will go a long way to funding the completion of an interactive, Web-based life cycle costing tool. The industry intuitively believes that integrated and intelligent buildings have significant return on investment. Now we can prove it."

The Intelligent Building Ranking System Task Force is developing an online tool intended to assist building owners/managers, the commercial real estate industry, and other industry stakeholders to assess the level of integrated systems within a building (a building intelligence quotient [BIQ]). A comprehensive list of intelligent building criteria has been developed as well as a "ranking matrix." The next phase of this project is to develop content detail on each line item in the matrix to be available as part of the online tool--for ease of use by all industry stakeholders.