Vince Ward, Project Officer at the Southern Housing Group

By Vince Ward

What started out as a community-based energy project on the Isle of Wight has morphed into a bona fide social movement.

Encouraged by the work of IBM Distinguished Engineer, Andy Stanford-Clark, who created a “smart” house that monitored, managed and optimized energy use, three years ago the Village of Chale created the Chale Community Project, which seeks, among other things, to reduce home energy costs by up to 50 percent. While the project has indeed raised awareness and helped residents lower costs, it has also had a serendipitous outcome – it has brought the community together.

From the very beginning of the Chale Community Project – during planning and roll-out phases – we worked on ensuring the local community was on board. Going from door to door, the team would communicate with residents about the plan of action, encourage participation and try to boost morale.

Click here to view the embedded video.

With confidence growing we continued by introducing schemes that would improve quality of life for the village. Local residents embraced the training schemes we provided on renewable technologies which not only offered new skills but opened up employment opportunities in areas previously unavailable. The schemes also benefited other parts of the island as residents could now act as ‘local green champions’ to educate other villages that were developing plans to become more sustainable.

These successful early activities encouraged the village to grab hold of the project and take it further. For example, local resident Peter Atkinson now manages a new data centre filled with computers donated from a local school that had closed. The computers are being used to train residents in core IT skills to help them use the Internet to pay bills and access online Government information. Atkinson believes that around 50 percent of the village is without Internet access in their homes, so the project has made a massive difference to people’s lives in that respect.

These activities have provided a solid foundation from which we built and expanded our sustainability project.  In addition to the aforementioned, the team has:

• Persuaded the local transport company to halve bus fares to encourage the use of public transportation for residents
• Seen a dramatic drop in rent arrears as energy monitoring has made utility bills more manageable; some residents have reported reductions of up to 50 percent
• Created an allotment area in the village, where young and old residents are brought together to reinforce a new sense of community spirit

Planning For The Future

Though we have achieved so much so far, we still have a lot of plans for the future.

For example, we are very excited to be the first village on the island working on a roll out of SMART meters that will replace electricity meters.

Additionally, we are talking to residents about launching a new electric vehicle project in the village which establishes clusters of electric vehicles (EV) to mimic a future network. If residents take part, we will offer the use of a brand new electric vehicle at a discounted rate for an 18-month trial period and install an EV charging point free of charge for each trial participant.

For us, the emphasis in all of these activities is on the community helping itself to live more sustainably. That is why we are pleased to be working with IBM to support the Business in the Community’s Start campaign called Be the Start. Start is an initiative inspired by HRH The Prince of Wales and the campaign is running throughout May with over 40 brands and organisations inspiring people to live sustainably by demonstrating how it can be rewarding and meaningful.

On 14 May IBM will bring sustainable living to life with a Chale focus on www.smartertrends.co.uk. IBM supported the installation of energy monitoring technology in the village which helped save energy and water so I’ll be hosting a Twitter chat with Andy Stanford-Clark on 14 May at 10:00AM ET to provide insights and top tips. So please come and join us by following @smartertrends or #IBMChale to find out more about the Chale Community Project.

Technorati Tags: Andy Stanford-Clark, Big Data, environmental stewardship, IBM Smarter Planet, innovation, Isle of Wight, smarter analytics, Smarter Cities, Smarter Energy, sustainability

Christopher Luongo, Writer/Strategist, IBM Communications

By Christopher Luongo

More school systems across the U.S. are looking for ways to balance their commitment to providing a top-notch education with the pressure of keeping their buildings in tip-top shape. To achieve this, some schools are moving away from paper-based systems and putting all their data, from operational and maintenance information to real estate and resource data, online. Doing so, however, is creating a whole new set of issues as the schools are now left to deal with the management of “Big Data.” 

Since it’s unreasonable to build brand new, energy-efficient buildings from the ground up, more school districts are looking within and starting to leverage and exploit the Big Data of building information. They’re starting to sift through critical data to make school structures more energy efficient and more cost-effective.

School districts from Portland, Oregon to Palm Beach, Florida are taking this approach. And with IBM’s help they’re finding highly profitable solutions that are helping to cut costs, save energy and enable schools to make smarter decisions on how school buildings are maintained and used. 

In times of tight budgets, being able to do more with the data has huge benefits. For schools, this enables them to cost-effectively and easily maintain old buildings that consume enormous amounts of energy and continually demand unexpected expenditures for equipment repairs.

Here are just a few examples of schools that are putting Big Data to work in their buildings with positive results:

Technorati Tags: Big Data, Big Data analytics, efficiency, innovation, smarter analytics, smarter schools

Martin Kienzle, Ph.D, Electronics Industry Leader, IBM Research

By Martin Kienzle

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week, the hype wasn’t all about the latest smartphone or tablet launch. Exhibitors and attendees alike were abuzz about the rapidly evolving smarter home – a concept that calls for connecting not only your mobile device to the web, but your TV, fridge, washing machine, thermostat and even your carbon monoxide detector. 

The analyst firm Parks Associates forecasts that more than 8 billion devices will be connected to the home network by the end of 2015. The breakthrough that’s driving this mass adoption – cloud computing. Cloud is quickly becoming the common platform to connect these disparate devices into an “Internet of Things.”

With cloud as the common foundation of the smarter home, energy consumption can be monitored as your thermostat adjusts to take advantage of utility rate fluctuations; lights, locks, appliances and home security systems can be turned on and off remotely; and even a carton of milk can reset its expiration date if you leave it out too long.

Perhaps most exciting for home entertainment enthusiasts, a cloud-connected television can recommend new TV shows based on your tastes, and advertising can be targeted to the individual (making it more relevant). Smart TV is already a reality in many homes, and companies like Philips TP Vision, Panasonic, LG and Toshiba are working together as part of the Smart TV Alliance to develop a common platform for interactive Smart TV applications and services hosted on the cloud.

In addition, IBM and Panasonic are teaming up to assess the business and technical value of home appliances connected to the cloud. Powered by IBM’s advanced analytics and cloud technology, the two companies will work together globally to evaluate and improve the user experience of a whole range of connected products and services.

A truly connected smarter home doesn’t mean everyone living in it will have to be glued to a control panel on their smartphone or tablet 24/7. When you’re at home, devices and appliances will learn to respond to voice commands and even physical gestures. In fact, at CES IBM announced a collaboration with STMicroelectronics and Shaspa to further such technology.

To create an open, non-proprietary smarter home ecosystem, the developers of digital services and content must create applications that can run on any device or network. That’s the beauty of an open cloud platform.

As the smarter home and Internet of Things advance, our electronics will soon be able to sense and anticipate our wants and needs even more intuitively. In the past, people had to adapt to their gadgets; in the future, devices and equipment will seamlessly perceive and respond to our needs and requests. As articulated in IBM Research’s “5 in 5″ tech predictions, in the next five years computers will begin to mimic and augment the senses, helping us become even more aware and productive.

Technorati Tags: CES, Consumer Electronics Show, home monitoring, IBM Smarter Planet, Smart cloud, Smarter Energy, Smarter Home

Andreas Dummler, Director of Information Systems, ARBURG GmbH + Co KG

By Andreas Dümmler

As one of the world’s leading manufacturers of injection molding machines used to make plastic products, ARBURG GmbH + Co KG is essentially a manufacturer’s manufacturer. We are as committed to smarter manufacturing processes in our own plants as our clients.

One of our foremost priorities is energy efficiency. As a family-owned business, environmental responsibility is a significant part of our culture. We make use of necessary resources, but stay true to a guiding principle to use the most energy efficient production and management systems in our plants as possible. Key tactics in facility engineering and management include the use of geothermal energy, photovoltaic technology, combined heat and power plants, rain water, waste heat from production equipment, and the use of natural ventilation and extraction in our buildings.

ARBURG’s injection molding machines are used by a range of customers in the automotive, electronics, packaging, medical equipment and consumer goods sectors in some 100 countries around the globe. We build all of our products to operate in an energy efficient manner and optimize the energy consumption at our clients’ plants.

For example, writing implement manufacturer Lamy, saves several thousand Euros annually by using electric ARBURG machines in its manufacturing process. At the same time, the company, a market-leader inGermany that also enjoys a strong market position inWestern Europe, is able to shorten production cycles and get its pens and other products to market faster.

Since 2008 ARBURG has presented the annual ARBURG Energy Efficiency Award to a company that excels in its corporate philosophy and activities in the field of energy efficiency. It is important that the winner, like us, takes an innovative, holistic and global approach to the topic of energy efficiency.

This year the award went to Continental, one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers. The company has targeted a 15 percent reduction in CO2 emissions and energy consumption in its production facilities by 2015. To reach this target, electric ARBURG machines are used in the injection molding area.

Given this focus, it only stands to reason that when it came time to upgrade ARBURG’s IT environment to better meet the goals of the business, energy efficiency was one of our primary considerations. This does not stem from altruism. It’s primarily sound business. Consider that of the more than 300 global businesses recently surveyed by IBM and IDC, only 21 percent were operating highly efficient data centers; those companies, however, were able to spend 50 percent more on business innovation and growth.

ARBURG chose to build its updated IT environment on the IBM zEnterprise mainframe for its ability to improve energy efficiency while accelerating time-to-market for our products without compromising on quality.

With IBM zEnterprise, ARBURG is able to make better use of the large amounts of data generated daily across our core business areas of development, procurement, production, sales and services. By migrating to zEnterprise, we have reduced our energy consumption by 80 percent and cut power consumption for disk storage by 25 percent.

ARBURG’s IT environment is part of our larger, long-term energy efficiency approach, which extends from our own production systems and buildings to the efficiency goals of our clients. In addition to the importance of environmental stewardship, we have long realized that there are significant savings to be gained from reducing company-wide energy consumption. This has been a key consideration in all of our investments for decades and remains true today as we move to a new IT environment.

Technorati Tags: ARBURG, efficiency, Energy efficiency, IBM Smarter Planet, IBM System z, Smarter manufacturing

Andy Stanford-Clark, Master Inventor and Chief Technology Officer, Smarter Energy, IBM UK & Ireland

By Andy Stanford-Clark

 

Last week you heard all about my personal mission to reduce the energy consumption in my “house that twitters” using home automation and energy monitoring technology.

Today, I’m going to talk about how we have taken the same technology applied in my home and used it to help change the lives of some residents of Chale – a small village on the south coast of the Isle of Wight.

In December 2009, Chale was selected as one of only ten communities in the UKto benefit from funding for a project to become a low-carbon community, and as a result The Chale Community Project was born. The project’s primary objective was to save energy and water in homes, resulting in reduced fuel costs. So how does the project work? Join me for a tour to find out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The project started by installing energy-saving upgrades into 65 homes, such as loft insulation and double (and in some places triple) glazing. The houses, none of which have gas mains, were then equipped with air-source heat pumps (a heating system that uses heat from the outside air as its energy source) and solar photo-voltaic (PV) panels to provide free electricity generated from the sun.

My involvement with the project was to specify and develop a monitoring kit that could be easily installed into the homes. We provided residents in 40 homes with a monitoring system very similar to the one that I use in my home. This includes:

- Sensor and wireless transmitter to monitor how much electricity is being used across the whole house.

- Individual Appliance Monitors (IAMs) on 6 selected appliances, e.g. washing machine, tumble dryer, TV, heaters, etc.

- Sensor and wireless transmitter on the PV Export meter to measure the electricity being generated by the solar panels throughout the day.

- Energy monitor display to show residents how much electricity they’re using at any time.

- Internet Bridge which connects the energy monitor to the Internet over broadband, and sends the energy usage data, via IBM MQTT technology, to the secure cloud infrastructure where the Chale Project data is stored.

The data is presented to residents so they can take control of their home energy usage by logging in to a web portal to see energy graphs for their house and identifying where they might be able to make savings. Some members of the Chale community have been trained as Green Energy assessors and they help other residents make sense of their energy information and suggest ways to reduce their usage and save money.

The data (in anonymous form) also provides valuable insights to housing associations and academic research partners on how energy is being used by residents. This enables useful energy savings advice to be given that’s based on behavioural changes. Such advice could be geared toward savings or suggesting further energy-saving technology that could be installed.

The feedback so-far from residents participating in the Chale Project has been fantastic. Some residents have reported a dramatic reduction in their energy bills with savings of up to 50 percent. One resident reported that his winter electricity bill has gone from £50 (approx $80) per week down to £25 (approx $40). In today’s tough times with the price of energy relentlessly rising, this is a great result for the residents of Chale!

So how do we ensure that everyone on the island, and even other islands and regions, can make use of this energy-saving technology? Well that’s where the Ecoisland initiative comes in. Next week my video diary blog will reveal more about Ecoisland and the overall initiative to build a Smart Grid that will integrate the Isle of Wight’s future solar, tidal, geothermal, wind power and other carbon-reducing technologies.

I’m also hosting a People for a Smarter Planet Twitter chat on 31^st October at 12:00PM ET. So join me to find out more about Ecoisland http://bit.ly/TEi8sy.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Ecoisland, energy costs, IBM, MQTT, Smarter Buildings, Smarter Energy, Smarter Planet

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.”

Technorati Tags: Dave Bartlett, green buildings, smarter physical infrastructure, Tririga

Heading into the second week of September, the hallways of the Los Angeles School District (LAUSD) are already buzzing with the sounds of students and teachers settling in for another school year.

Similar to many other schools around the nation, LAUSD is also facing another year of budget cuts to several of its education programs and extracurricular activities. In fact, a survey from the American Association of School Administrators cites that more than 8 in 10 school districts in the U.S. are inadequately funded for the coming year. Clearly, we all must do more with less.

We chose to tackle this problem head on and find innovative ways where we could help reduce costs and keep the focus on our number one priority: the students.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As the second largest school district in the US, our campus spans 14,000 buildings and is spread out over 710 square miles. With more than 300,000 maintenance service requests every single year, the upkeep of our school happens to be one of the main areas we have spent too much time, money and energy. Often times, all of our resources go into locating and reporting a problem before we even have a chance to fix it.

But now, LAUSD has a new weapon to help our repair crews stay steps ahead of the problems — our army of 700,000 students. With nearly 25 percent of kids between the ages of 14 and 17 already owning a smartphone, we enlisted their help — along with the rest of our faculty and staff — to act as living sensors and report maintenance problems they saw first hand using their mobile devices.

Now, students can do much more with these devices than just play Angry Birds and keep up with their social networks. They can also use their phones to be responsible citizens and help keep their schools in tip top shape.

Through analytics technology provided by IBM, and a mobile app through IBM partner CitySourced, users have turned their smartphones into a sensor to help us identify maintenance issues in need of repair — from a leaky faucet, smashed windows, graffiti to broken toilets.

Add to this the power of crowdsourcing, and this simple mobile app enables the school district to engage its students, faculty and staff to help keep their schools clean and safe.

With the use of the new mobile app, all reported issues sent with a simple text or photo goes directly to the school’s maintenance office. Each request also contains GIS information to pinpoint locations so workers know exactly where to route staff, saving time and resources.

Prior to this crowdsourcing app, we relied on faculty and staff to report maintenance issues with the campus plant manager, requiring the manager to decipher and pinpoint each issue before the appropriate personnel was sent to solve the problem. It was a time consuming process.

These results shows that leveraging tools that already exist, combined with a little ingenuity can create drastic improvements. So, despite those long, lazy summer days already being a distant memory, I know that as students and teachers walk down our halls, they’ll appreciate knowing that the days they spend on our campus will be safer, greener and more efficient thanks to their own hard work.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Los Angeles, mobile, Schools, smartphone

It’s part of an innovative First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) project that will help public school buildings in the city reduce their energy consumption through analytics.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In New York City, where buildings account for 75 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions each year, it’s unreasonable to build brand-new, energy-efficient buildings from the ground up.

But what if you could use technology to sift through critical building data to make school structures more energy efficient and more cost-effective?

Members of the New York City Department of Education and the City University of New York (CUNY) asked IBM this question as they began to think about new ways to improve energy efficiency in the city’s public school buildings.

IBM’s answer was to invite them into its labs, where researchers were working on advanced analytics and statistical modeling technologies that could provide insights into the every-day operations of buildings, including energy usage.  Another First-of-a-Kind project was born.

The system that was created lets facility staff track and analyze energy use, compare school buildings’ energy efficiency, forecast power needs, and run simulations on building improvements to predict the benefits of various retrofitting projects.

For example, a facilities department manager or custodian could run the tool, click on the simulation capability, and find out how much energy could be saved by replacing old, single-pane windows with double pane windows.

Also, heating energy used in one building could be compared with that of a nearby building of similar size and age. Perhaps that building serves the same number of students but consumes 20-percent less energy. To improve the less-efficient facility, facilities staff could explore retrofitting projects through computer simulations.

The CUNY project stands to benefit not only New York City’s school buildings, but also the 1.1 million students within. IBM and CUNY are training teachers on the system’s interactive features, which can help examine real energy use and translate it into tangible classroom lessons on environmental impact.

As the City University of New York is discovering, bringing greater intelligence and connectedness into a building’s operations can go a long way toward creating a truly integrated and smarter building system, while reducing energy consumption and developing energy-conscious students along the way.

And as all the FOAK projects are proving, it is the dynamic nature of this close interaction with IBM clients and the changing forces of the real world that drives innovation and brings it to market at an ever-quickening pace.

Technorati Tags: buildings, CUNY, IBM, IBM Research, new york city, school

With gas once again flirting with $4 per gallon, imagine shopping for a car in a world where vehicles didn’t come with mileage ratings.

Sure, a smart driver would likely a gut feeling that the pint-sized Prius would be cheaper to fuel than the hulking Hummer for sale next to it. But without official data, or at least a Hummer driver willing to share mileage figures, it’d be tough to know for sure what it would cost to operate the two vastly different vehicles for years to come.

It sounds absurd. Yet for most buyers of houses, commercial buildings and other properties, that far-fetched scenario is pretty much the reality today. Buyers have precious little information of how much energy a given property will consume.

Yet while we’d roll our eyes at the owner of a super-sized SUV who seems surprised about high fill-up costs, who hasn’t heard a story of a person who bought a home only to discover later that it’s hugely expensive to heat and cool?

Luckily city planners, engineers and companies are recognizing that the vacuum of information about building performance is a key to boosting building efficiency, and improving real estate market information—better data helps owners and their tenants make smarter decisions.

An intriguing effort to make this sort of building performance data more transparent surfaced recently in New York City. It’s a map of the city’s five boroughs, color-coded to show the energy intensity of practically every building in the Big Apple’s dense mix of commercial, residential, and mixed-use regions.

The map renders energy consumption in a spectrum of colors: dense, energy-hungry midtown glows darkly red; while low-density, residential swaths of Queens are pale yellow. The design is a first, important step towards giving building owners a great sense of how their energy use compares with their neighbors.

Known as the New York City Energy Mapping Project, the map is the fruit of a study produced by the Modi Research Group at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. The work was jointly presented by co-author Vijay Modi, a professor of mechanical engineering, and lead-author Bianaca Howard, a PhD candidate, at the Northeast Clean Heat and Power Initiative conference in January.

“This map will enable New York City building owners to see whether their own building consumes more or less than what an average building with similar function and size would,” said Modi, quoted in The New York Times Green blog.

“Midtown Manhattan has more energy use than the whole country of Kenya, and New York State uses more energy than all of sub-Saharan Africa,” Modi told The Wall Street Journal.  “For the big expenses we pay for energy we don’t have any idea what we are paying for,” he added. “We get a bill from Conn Ed for let’s say $150, we don’t know how much of that is to run the refrigerator, the heating, the shower?”

To be clear, the visualization is not an exact snapshot of actual energy use. Rather, the researchers adapted data from the New York City Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability to build a statistical model that estimates yearly energy consumption for every “tax lot” in New York—a close approximation of each structure in the city, according to CNET.

The map shows energy intensity—energy consumed per square meter of each tax lot—in terms of both heat and electricity. Passing a mouse across the map, a user can interact with the map to reveal total annual building energy consumption.

Still, the New York City energy intensity map is a great start towards clearing the fog that obscures how and where energy is used by buildings.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As many commenters noted, the map’s next iteration should take the data one step further, revealing not just energy use by lot, but by square footage. This would add an important nuance, making it easier to distinguish energy users by efficiency.

For example, consider the Empire State Building. The 102-story tower would show up on the current map as a dark red block given its large total energy demand. But that obscures its superior efficiency. Having recently completed a $550-million retrofit, the building has cut its energy appetite by over a third. So today, King Kong’s tower runs using less energy and at lower costs than most buildings of its size.

The good news is that more detailed energy use data is becoming available. New York City has enacted groundbreaking new rules for buildings to benchmark their energy use.  Starting last year, the rules require private buildings of over 50,000 square feet to file their use of energy (and in some cases water) with the city where it will be posted in a public database.

As building performance data becomes more transparent, building owners are more likely to respond to price signals. Studies show that even with the incomplete information now available, more efficient buildings such as the Empire State Building, are attracting higher-paying tenants, and commanding higher occupancy rates and superior prices at resale. Strong market signals like these are likely to spur owners of less efficient buildings to invest in upgrades; banks are more likely to finance those upgrades if there’s solid data to support the return on the investment..

There are likely to be second-order economic benefits that flow from efforts to map and compare building performance. Energy data analysis is a hotspot in software development, with big established software companies and small startups all spying the emerging pools of building performance data as an opportunity to build user-friendly applications.

In New York City in January, the Cleanweb Hackathon—a Silicon Valley-style weekend-long marathon of pizza-powered coding and venture capital courting—points to the potential. Many of the proposed business models and one of the winners (nycbldgs.com), Martin LaMonica notes at CNET, made use of public domain data to visualize energy consumption and spur competition between households, or buildings, to lower energy use.

New York is learning that the information really is power—in this case, the power to lower energy use. The city offers a great example of how, step-by-step, tools to understand energy use, and rules to encourage more transparent building energy information have the power to spur efficiency investment.

And, luckily, the lessons are catching on. The Institute for Market Analysis, a Washington (D.C.)-based advocate for green building policy, has been tracking the spread of these rules: a fast growing pack of other cities and states are developing and deploying unprecedented levels of performance disclosure.

Technorati Tags: Big Data, buildings, data, IBM, map, new york city

By Ken Schwartz, Dean, Tulane School of Architecture and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects

Few places understand the concept of rebuilding as deeply as New Orleans does since Hurricane Katrina struck seven years ago this month. The tragedy generated an impressive rebuilding process in the City of New Orleans, leading to a more sustainable future environmentally, economically, and in terms of social equity.  This tragedy gave New Orleans the opportunity to rebuild a more sustainable, green city. As the city began to restore itself, great attention was given to listening to the community and the environment.

Although “being green” may be a priority for many cities, they often just don’t know where to start the journey. Transportation? Water? Energy? The process can be downright daunting.

At the Tulane School of Architecture, the choice of where to begin became quite clear: the historic building that comprises our school.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tulane estimates that the energy use of its buildings represents two-thirds of the university’s impact on its carbon emissions – even taking in account the fuel our employees and students use for commuting. As the School of Architecture contemplated a renovation and expansion of its signature building, we wanted to do so with a forward thinking approach to energy usage.

But Tulane is not alone in facing this challenge. Buildings consume 42 percent of all energy worldwide; energy costs represent about 30 percent of a building’s total operating cost – u p to 50 percent of energy and water are often wasted.

Post-Katrina, Tulane is an example of an institution demonstrating a sense of responsibility about the way we can contribute to rebuilding not only a campus more sustainably, but the city of New Orleans as well. The goal of the Smarter Buildings project was to provide baseline data on the energy use of a historic pre-renovation building by listening to and responding to the building’s actual operations.

Century-old Richardson Memorial Hall—the home of the Tulane School of Architecture—has some of the best and worst examples you will see in a historic structure. The design studio features a span of space with operable windows, high ceilings and beautiful exposed wood trusses. But on the ground floor there’s a collection of building systems that have evolved over the last century – not operating at their peak efficiency by any stretch of the imagination. In a way, the contrast between these two spaces points to the opportunity in front of us with this project.

Working with IBM over the past year, we worked to make this historic building smarter by “listening to” and analyzing all the data the building has to offer—heating, cooling, water and lighting. As a result, the building is now infused with intelligence to monitor minute-to-minute its own energy usage, report problems ranging from malfunctioning equipment to water pipe leaks, provide the data needed to help cut energy use and conserve water, and use a fraction of its current resources.

This living laboratory will be the kind of building our community—and our country—needs to navigate the future, especially since buildings will be the biggest consumers of energy on the planet in just 15 short years.

Our hope is that the work started here with our architecture students will help galvanize other schools, architects, organizations, and businesses. We want to be a resource others can turn to when they begin tackling their own projects for using technology to improve efficiency, sustainability, and energy usage.

Architecture is no longer simply about designing physical buildings and urban planning. Technology is playing an increasingly vital role in how buildings are designed and managed.

By listening to our buildings, our students and campus can help to build a more sustainable future for New Orleans. This is where we chose to start our journey. Listening to buildings could be the next “Green Wave” of energy efficiency. That’s not only good for our students’ careers—it’s good for all of us.

See related links: Meet IBMer Kerrie Holley and his work in New Orleans

New Orleans Comeback

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The Miami Dolphins Aim to Transform the Fan Experience at Sun Life Stadium

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