Posted by
Richard Silberman in
- Analytics
- Another Person for a Smarter Planet
- People for a Smarter Planet
- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
- Smarter Planet
- sustainability
David Bartlett, Vice President, Industry Solutions, Smarter Buildings, IBM Software Group
By Richard Silberman, Writer/Researcher, IBM Communications
Every time you walk into a building, think about this: it’s alive and kicking and wants to be fed.
It’s not just some static structure standing there. As Dave Bartlett, vice president of smarter buildings at IBM, sees it, a building is remarkably analogous to a living organism.
The heating and cooling system is also the building’s respiratory system, bringing in fresh air and removing carbon dioxide. It consumes enormous amounts of energy and water along with producing the associated waste.
The musculoskeletal system provides form, support, stability and movement to the building. Sensors, computer monitoring and other instrumentation make up the building’s nervous system.
And, just like in the human body, all these systems are interconnected and affect one another.
Bartlett developed his “physiology of buildings” concept to help illustrate how buildings work and how they should be managed to optimize operations and maximize energy efficiency. In other words, how to make them healthy.
“Today we have the ability to get a constant stream of data from our physical infrastructure and run analytics to derive deeper insight into how to better manage our buildings,” Bartlett said. The key is to monitor and manage buildings from a system of systems perspective, rather than view each piece of equipment independently.
“If we can think of buildings and listen to them holistically, we open up a whole new way of understanding buildings that will allow us to heal them of their wild energy and water wasting ways,” Bartlett said.
Leading the drive for smarter buildings
Bartlett is known in industry circles as the “Building Whisperer” because of his ability to listen to buildings and tame them of their excesses. On that front, the world has much work to do.
Buildings consume over 40 percent of the world’s energy and emit more carbon dioxide into the environment than cars. By 2025, buildings will be the largest energy consumers on earth. Today, in large cities, buildings are already the largest energy consumers and producers of greenhouse gases.
Bartlett evangelizes far and wide about the urgent need for more sustainable, energy-efficient buildings and IBM’s unique capabilities to help achieve this.
“IBM is doing something in the building space that hasn’t been done before,” Bartlett said. “We’re listening to all the data that’s coming from buildings - not just from the heat and air conditioning units, but from all the systems across all the buildings a company manages.” This can include lighting systems, security systems, utilities interfaces and even city command centers.
IBM’s TRIRIGA smarter building solution integrates with all building systems, regardless of manufacturer to provide a real-time view of a building’s energy use and overall operation. It also supports holistic management of the building environment.
According to Bartlett, smarter buildings can save as much as 40 percent on energy costs, 50 percent on water, and up to 30 percent on building maintenance. “Understanding what’s happening in a building in real-time means you can tell when something needs to be fixed before it breaks,” he said.
An optimist on a mission
Bartlett’s on a self-proclaimed mission to change the way we think about and manage buildings and bring them front and center into the conversation about smarter cities and a healthier planet.
“The way we waste energy and water today is crazy,” Bartlett said. “Why is it that when you go to the movie theater, you have to take a sweater, warm socks and a scarf? Why do office buildings have the lights and air conditioning on when no one is in them — or the sprinklers turn on even when it’s about to rain outside? It doesn’t have to be that way.”
Bartlett’s vision for the future goes well beyond instrumentation of individual structures to include a much broader, systematic approach to designing and managing our entire building environment. He advocates strategies to integrate buildings into their surroundings that may radically reduce energy use and improve the quality of our lives.
“Imagine contiguous corridors of green that traverse up the sides of buildings and across roofs, not only providing better water absorption, oxygen and insulation, but also an ecosystem for butterflies, birds and small mammals that will begin to blur the harsh lines that we’ve drawn between cities and countrysides,” Bartlett said.
“Maybe that seems too optimistic, but that’s my vision of the world and I think we can achieve it sooner rather than later,” Bartlett said. “We have the technology and there’s an awareness of the need for sustainable solutions that I’m confident will stir decision-makers to action.”
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12:28 pm
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Posted by: Meet Dave Bartlett: Another Person for a Smarter Planet
11:32 am
Excellent article. It is certainly something we need to rediscover – buildings that work with rather than against the environment. IBM will be interested in the monitoring, controlling and analytics of course, but we need to understand (as you say) the low-tech approaches too.
Amazing that what was hippy-dippy stuff in the 70s is now being drawn into the business space.
What would be really nice would be to see IBM committing to this in the non-flagship offices so it isn’t just a selling tool.
Posted by: C Tiney
10:33 am
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Posted by: event wristbands
3:51 pm
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Keep up the good work!
Posted by: yesRX
9:24 am
Janni, thanks for your post. IBM has spoken with several AEC firms about the value of including operational energy analytics as part of building systems during turnover. LEED certification includes a sizable bonus for energy modeling and analytics. From an ROI perspective, in the commercial space the payback for these systems are on the order of 2 years. Similar concepts could be applied for homes, however the systems tend to be simpler, and not sure of the payback since IBM has been focused on the commercial space.
Posted by: Jim Crosskey
4:09 pm
Are you engaging with architects and builders to determine how the Smarter Building technology can be utilized in LEED buidlings and retrofits? I am currently building a LEED platinum home and there ought to be significant Innovation credits, as well as the ability to forecast a lower set of operating cost assumptions for a smarter building. Also, getting in front of the leading architects for commercial projects (likely they can bet continuing ed credits with the AIA) would be one way to incorporate the IBM Smarter Building protocol into the early design. I know my architect is looking at the beginnings of his projects differently based on some of the paths we’ve chosen for our own home. This is such a great idea – just needs to be affordable and quantifiable in terms of paybacks, etc. for the builder, buyer, developer, etc.
Posted by: Janni Cone
11:58 pm
IBM Smarter Building technology is great for the earth and terrific for business. What a win-win! Kudos to you, Dave, and your team. I know the IBM Austin site has saved real cash through use of some of this technology this year. We all need to evangelize this innovative/sensible set of solutions!
Posted by: Sandy Dochen
10:39 am
This is an excellent example where making smarter buildings is the right thing to do from a CSR standpoint, as well as an economical standpoint. These are areas where IBM can make a clear impact on a Company’s bottom line, as well as make a clear marketing case that IBM is essential for the reality of our world in the aftermath of the industrial revolution.
Posted by: Chris Byrd
2:28 pm
Nice article Dave. The analogy is great and as Buildings get more and more instrumented with sensors and BMS systems, more opportunities to pin point the inefficiencies and help them to operate efficiently via smart analytics.
Hi Farid,
Meters information can be collected via the agents periodically and loaded into warehouse, from where the aggregated data gets to Tririga (it provides data connect and other tools t load information in). Further for analytics,
ILOG JRules, can be used to take the data from the database and write rules against it. The rules will then run at a regular interval and detect anomalies and inform via many different ways to end user.
Best Regards,
Naeem.
Posted by: Naeem
1:05 pm
After reading this article, I started looking at the buildings as systems instead of mere structures designed for tolerance :)
Thank you so much!!!
Posted by: Anil Mutyala
7:40 am
A beautifully written piece on how the team in IBM is working to make IBM essential. There is an art to communicating solutions in a simple & understandable way, which helps make these ideas take hold. You have captured this here. Good luck with your vision, I share this with you.
Posted by: Stephen Caulfield
6:09 am
What you say in last paragraph is very good and not so new after all, think Babylon’s gardens of Semiramis. We should reinvent our cities and buildings and cars, make them more close to nature. Did you think about the walls? In nature every wall is soft, at least partially and have multiple roles. We make our building or car walls hard and their role is very limited. Can do better. I have some ideas.
I would like to be part of this. I would like to get in touch with you and work on some projects.
Posted by: Claudiu Cernat
1:36 am
Buildings also have smart meters, how does Tririga integrate to smart meters and perform analytics to provide consumer behaviour and detect intervention effects in improving efficiencies. I have an RFP coming in those lines in Oct for us to respond and it will be good to have some views on it.
Posted by: Farid Tareen