The world is waking up to a green revolution. From banning the use of single-use plastics to creating a sustainability awareness in manufacturing and production industries, many initiatives are driving the environmental preservation wave today. The Paris Agreement, especially, requires countries to follow through with their greenhouse gas emission reductions as promised during the summit.
So, how can countries take measures to reduce their carbon footprint? In a continent as large as Asia, a land that is home to about 60 per cent of the world’s population, every step towards pollution reduction counts.
When it comes to controlling greenhouse gas emissions, the most effective way is to make the use of energy more efficient. By reducing the consumption and reliance on traditionally generated energy, Asia would take a big leap towards a cleaner future.
One effective way to manage energy consumption is using modern smart building technology, like automated lighting and intelligently managed HVAC systems. Let’s dig deeper into the various ways building technology can help Asia move towards a greener, healthier future.
The confluence of security solutions, analytics and utility automation
Energy consumption is the highest during peak times in commercial buildings. Being larger in size, the management of HVAC and lighting becomes a matter of complication. These buildings have spaces that are intended for different purposes, which define how frequently these spaces will be utilised and by how many people.
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By integrating your building’s commercial access control system with automated HVAC control and an analytics platform, an efficient way to manage energy consumption can be achieved:
- Security cameras would give the data input regarding the frequency, quantity and duration of use of each space of a building by the populace while also keeping your building secure by deterring up to 61 per cent of burglaries.
- The analytics engine would then draw up a trends chart that would display the usage patterns of each space, clearly determining the high and low use areas of a commercial building.
- The automated/managed HVAC system can then utilise these trend charts to deploy services according to space use.
The commercial access control system sensors, furthermore, can be programmed effectively to communicate one-time use areas to prevent HVAC from deploying resources for such cases. Space utilisation combined with intelligent analytics and HVAC management work to streamline energy consumption based on space occupancy.
Service automation
Automation has always been a driver of efficiency, wherever it is applied. In fact, in a study published by Report Linker, it was found that the market for building automation systems is expected to reach an amount of US$148.6 billion by the end of 2027, rising at a compounded annual growth rate of 11.4 per cent. These figures alone spell out the seriousness of the global building management industry to optimise its energy use through automation and its implements.
To that end, the automation of HVAC management systems can prove to be instrumental in achieving energy consumption efficiencies in managed smart buildings. HVAC would need to be digitised and integrated with access control systems to reduce energy consumption when occupancy is low:
- The system control activation mechanism is a great way to adjust a building’s energy use according to occupancy. The system relies on utilising access card data to deduce the occupancy of a space. Integration with HVAC, lighting and other utilities allows the automation engine to switch up or down the energy consumption accordingly
- The event management mechanism relies on high-footfall event analysis to adjust energy consumption. For example, if a commercial building hosts conferences, meetings or seminars during a week, the resource planning software can be programmed to receive inputs from digitised building use schedules to plan the deployment of building services intelligently
Building management systems are smart, automated and reliable today. Integrating them with building services, access control and building use patterns sets a great foundation for managing efficient energy use.
Building management IoT
Internet of Things, or IoT, is a way to intelligently analyse the space use of a building through integrating various access controllers, sensors, and other security devices on a single, communicative platform.
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When these devices transfer their data to a building management system, the smart analytics draw up the trends and patterns of space use, allowing the management system full control over service deployment (HVAC, lighting and others).
The best benefit that comes from enabling IoT with smart building management is the access to real-time data that can provide high-quality, actionable insights to plan energy consumption effectively.
Furthermore, by automating the HVAC and lighting of the building, the building management system would practically run itself and learn from the analytics of building use, polishing its resource use more with each run.
Wrapping up
Energy consumption is one of the highest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions across the globe. In Asia, with a huge portion of the population inhabiting the continent, these emissions are far more prominent; the need to manage energy consumption is far more pressing than in other continents.
The adoption of smart buildings is helping lead the effort to reduce energy consumption, with the smart building market projected to grow by 10.9 per cent from US$72.6 billion in 2021 to US$121.6 billion by 2026. Implementing automation, IoT, and smart analytics with smart building technology in managing energy use is a great start in the revolution for a cleaner future.
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