As I wrote in a recent post, the green building industry really is starting to embrace automation and electronic control systems as a way to achieve energy savings.
This is starting to take off at the commercial level—and will no doubt soon extend into the residential market as well.
At the recent Greenbuild Expo in Chicago, I had a chance to talk with reps from several companies in the building automation arena, who see the market picking up for building automation and energy management systems. (See my post here on green builders and architects finally turning toward IT systems to achieve energy efficiency.)
Mike Kempa of Honeywell Building Solutions’ Division of Sustainable Solutions, says, “We’re starting to get more LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) buildings. And the push to smart grid means that buildings need to be intelligent.”
“For building managers, energy efficiency has gone from the bottom to the top of the list,” says Joe Tossig, a solutions sales engineer with AutomatedLogic, an HVAC systems monitoring software company owned by Carrier. “Any savings they can see on the utility bill goes right to bottom line. There’s now a recognition that energy is really expensive.”
A big push in building automation, says Honeywell’s Kempa, is coming from government buildings that are mandated to be green, as well as institutional settings like universities and advocacy groups like the ACUPCC (American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment) that strive to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from campus operations.
(See our post on how Morrison Hall at the University of North Carolina won the recent EPA’s National Building Contest, and how several of the other top finishers are using electronic energy management.)
Another huge factor in the push toward more building automation and energy management are costs. “The price point of sensing technology is going down,” says Steven E. Kuehn at building control giant Siemens. “Devices are getting smarter and less expensive, so in a cost effective way you can get more control.”
Kuehn sees other hurdles being cleared as well. “Attitudinal barriers falling away. We’re increasingly able to articulate to our customers the benefits [of energy management.]”
Here Comes Residential Automation, Too
Yes, the push toward building automation as a way toward energy efficiency is happening largely in the commercial sector, where government and institutional influences are steering new buildings toward energy efficiency. And that doesn’t necessarily mean residential automation and energy management will take a back seat and wait.
Huge service providers like ADT, Comcast and Verizon are rolling out low-cost “connectivity” solutions to existing homes, and they plan to follow-up with energy monitoring and management offerings. These companies have the potential to introduce millions of people to energy management systems in their homes—and open up a huge retrofit market.
More and more smart grid offerings from electric utilities are introducing homeowners to cloud-level energy management in the form of demand response and time-of-use pricing—both of which could trigger more sales of control systems in homes. Smart appliances that can connect to two-way smart meters being rolled out as part of the smart grid offerings will begin selling in 2011. Plug-in electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles like the Nissan Leaf and GM Volt will require more and more smart charging options. And companies like Intel, Cisco and others are rolling out energy management systems for smart grid usage.
These many factors point to the home requiring some sort of automation and control system to perform invisible or near-invisible energy management. This is really happening, folks, so you better get ready for it.
