This contributed piece for Energy Demand comes from Rob Bamforth, marketing director at software platform company Ecosteer – the firm’s market proposition is that monitoring energy consumption (or production!) is not enough to know if your business site is really efficient: what really matters is how energy usage changes with varying temperature, humidity and luminosity.

The concept of smart buildings is not new and the primary driver (especially most recently) has been the drive to reduce energy consumption. Computer controlled building management systems (BMS) and building energy management systems (BEMS) have for some time been portrayed as ideal tools to deliver a combination of energy efficiency and comfortable working conditions. Information about the state of the of the building’s environment is collected from sensors, fed back and collated for the information to be acted upon – automatically but sometimes with some human intervention and decision making.

It’s never that simple

Generally however, the solution is not that simple. A BMS is often closely tied to the controls for specific elements of building mechanical and electrical services – power, ventilation, lighting etc. and are designed during installation process. As such, not only can they be proprietary to specific hardware, they are more focused on the machinery of the building than the outcome, and are often poor at adapting to evolving usage patterns and post-installation changes.

Also, if a BMS measures only certain aspects of the total building environment, it provides a picture that is at best incomplete, or at worst incorrect. For example, systems that focus purely on power consumption might miss the reasons why changes in energy usage have taken place – how was a space being used, are systems failing or under strain, are occupants being forced into other measures to compensate for varying conditions etc.?

For these reasons it is becoming necessary to take a broader environment based approach, and shift the perspective from the bottom up view oriented around hardware – controls, sensors and systems – to a top down view that logically reflects the needs of those managing and using the building.

Logical viewpoint

Building management and control systems link directly to specific physical features or elements of the building, but the people tasked with managing the workplace facilities have other concerns. Do the current environments of different spaces match their intended use e.g. groups of people or storing certain goods? Are flexible offices meeting their occupancy targets? Can energy costs be accurately matched to departmental cost centres?

To answer these business-oriented questions, building or facilities managers need the information to be structured in a way that is meaningful to them and supports their commercial needs, rather than the more technically minded installers of the building systems. This might mean that different types of environmental attributes are collected to give a more complete picture of a particular place, or that similar attributes from different objects are amalgamated for comparison purposes. Common threads or topics that span different entities might also need to be linked together to simplify the information presented.

In each of these cases it is unlikely that neither the designer of the systems nor their installers will know about the day to day business needs of those running the facilities, nor how these change over time and with different usage patterns.

A broader environmental view

Many systems aim to indicate power usage and thus measure amounts consumed at particular points, but this does not provide a complete picture. There may be losses that are unaccounted for, say during distribution, or environmental factors that might explain or justify higher energy figures.

Wider environmental data might offer reasons why these things are happening and allow remedial action to be taken. For example an air conditioning filter might be clogged leading to a reduced airflow and increased power consumption. A combination of data points builds awareness of an underlying issue that can be fixed before it becomes critical or leads to a failure.

Beyond the sensor

There are other major systems which affect and interact with the environment of a building which are also already being monitored – in particular IT and communications systems. These typically have software agents that log or provide alerts into IT and network management systems. Some of this information could feed significant intelligence into the management of the building, yet is often ignored as IT is seen as something separate. Combining this information with that gleaned from sensors would allow more efficient management of both IT and building systems.

Taking the IT theme a stage further, it is clear that not all information necessary for efficient building management can be gathered directly from sensors, some has to be derived. Rules, calculations and combinations need to be assembled to ensure that relevant intelligence, rather than simply sensor data, is presented to building managers.

From BMS to EMS

Instead of looking solely at the fabric and physical systems to manage, taking a view of the whole environment will provide a more efficient use of a building. This efficiency comes not only from properly understanding energy demands, but also the needs and expectations of the occupants, and the business processes the building is put to. Using a more holistic approach, organisations can manage not only their energy costs, but also maintenance issues and ultimately, the overall suitability of buildings for the purposes and demands to which they are subjected.