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It’s virtually impossible to imagine a city without conjuring an image of its skyline, or at the very least, a vista of the buildings that populate it. Likewise, in smart cities, smart buildings play a role as dominant as any skyscraper. The future belongs to structures with sensor networks that can monitor electricity and water usage in real time, track sustainability performance and interact with other parts of the smart city.
First, consider how electricity and power work in a smart city scenario: Grids manage distribution through the constant monitoring of supply and demand data. Working along with smart buildings, smart grids can connect to structures that learn occupants’ energy needs, respond to changing weather conditions and automatically adjust themselves to maximize efficiency.
That’s crucial because buildings account for up to 70% of energy consumption in major cities—and 30% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, according to statistics cited by Connected Cities USA. Smart buildings can reduce the carbon footprint.
“Data collected and insights generated by smart building technologies can lead to changes in facilities management that reduce energy consumption for climate and sustainability goals and help improve public health and safety,” writes Christina Jung, a senior consultant for Navigant Research, in a Connected Cities commentary.
Smart buildings also mark a major step forward in meeting LEED standards as outlined by the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the most widely used green building rating system in the world and consists of four levels, ranging from a basic certification to platinum status. Getting to platinum isn’t easy, as performance in water usage, heating and cooling systems, air quality and power consumption must be top notch.
By collecting data and making continuous adjustments, smart buildings address the goal of greater efficiency—while also getting other operational areas to work in concert.
In most cases, the various systems of a building—fire protection, ventilation and climate control, lighting and video surveillance—do their jobs separately. But in a smart building, these systems feed into a central control and talk to each other via Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity. For example, sensors that detect a lack of activity in vacant offices can inform lighting and temperature systems to dedicate less resources to those spaces, thus cutting down on waste.
This also takes advantage of a robust combination of workload consolidation and edge computing: taking various technologies and bringing them into a unified platform, while keeping the data close to its origin for faster analytics, feedback and decision making.
Smart buildings can also talk to one another. This marks a major step toward the goal of creating “microgrids” that stabilize primary grids, compensate for supply fluctuations and reduce overall energy demand. Or in a more straightforward connection, a smart building can curtail its energy consumption on days when its smart city power grid sends an alert that it’s near capacity.
But there is also another benefit to having smart buildings populating a smart city—and that’s financial. Smart buildings not only save money but are also worth more than comparable non-connected buildings because they run better. The benefits of smart technology also make them more attractive to tenants, which results in lower vacancy rates.
What’s more, smart buildings generate lots of data—which is itself an asset because it documents in fine detail how the building has performed and where the greatest gains have been achieved. Applied to machine learning technology, such data can also provide a foundation for even stronger building performance: What gets measured can ultimately be streamlined, fixed or improved upon.
Findings of a 2018 Forbes Insights/Intel survey of 211 senior leaders around the globe bear this out. Asked to rate whether building management technologies have produced a return on investment, two-thirds of those surveyed, 66%, responded “yes.” This number could potentially increase sooner rather than later, as some financial returns in building management may not manifest themselves right away.
But what if you don’t have a smart city infrastructure that can support smart buildings? The question itself actually suggests the answer, in that smart buildings as self-contained structures can act as seeds for a larger urban effort. Older buildings can also be upgraded with IoT technologies to take full advantage of the data they generate to make adjustments in how they operate.
“Developing smart buildings will give rise to smart campuses, which will foster smart communities, and eventually smart cities,” notes Harry G. Smeenk, vice president of program development at the Telecommunications Industry Association, in Smart Buildings Magazine. “Simply put, smart buildings will create a scalable foundation for creating the elusive smart city, building by building, from the ground up.”
In other words, smart buildings themselves can serve as the building blocks of the next smart city. Credit
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