How to use energy analytics to create smarter buildings

In brief:

• IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, campus demonstrated energy cost reductions of 8% across the solution-enabled assets at a site that had already achieved annual energy reductions in excess of 6% through energy savings projects and capital investment.
• In the closed-loop intelligence system, sensing and monitoring leads to data storage, which is used for analytics that drive improvements. When reporting and sustainability and optimum operating conditions are achieved, the system repeats all over again. 
• The analytics enable an understanding of the energy assets’ real-time operating variables, and that provides the ability to act immediately on operational malfunction and provide ongoing visibility to long-term energy efficiency.

With hundreds of facilities supporting its global operations, the energy conservation challenge is all too familiar to IBM. Over the years, the company took a leadership role in implementing energy conservation and building management practices that promote environmental and cost-effective operations. Huge investment has been made in global energy conservation with teams focused on driving energy efficiency programs, education programs to drive behavioral change and large capital investments to install high-efficiency equipment. These programs have been successful at driving annual savings in energy consumption, but, to achieve these reductions continually, innovation and adaptation need to be embraced and today IBM is gaining a new level of economic, operational and environmental benefit.

IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, campus is one of the first IBM facilities to benefit. The Rochester campus consists of 3.2 million square ft of space and has more than 35 interconnected buildings, including manufacturing facilities, testing labs, office buildings and a worldwide data center. It’s the sixth-highest energy user in IBM’s global facilities portfolio, making it an ideal location to launch the program.

The solution for smarter buildings (Figure 1) is enabled through integrated asset and service work-order management combined with energy and sustainability management analytics. The system achieves further benefits through deeper understanding and visibility of third party facility management contracts enabled by the smarter building data analysis. The visibility this solution provides into the performance of the energy-consuming devices, along with work order management and the time from failure to correction of equipment, drives significantly improved efficiency and productivity.

The solution has helped IBM to see what its buildings are saying, in terms of energy consumption and efficiency, providing a new depth of intelligence to the building management systems of each building, resulting in an enterprise view of energy use and efficiency. The advanced operational and energy analytics uncovered previously hidden systemic operational and energy use malfunctions and inefficiency (waste), while sustaining an optimized posture. Once the problems are resolved, the solution yields a lower baseline in energy utilization, resulting in reductions in both energy and operational costs.

The results from IBM Rochester demonstrated energy cost reductions of 8% across the solution-enabled assets at an IBM site that had consistently achieved annual energy reductions in excess of 6% through energy savings projects and capital investment. The savings from this pilot were achieved through the immediate identification of equipment that had exceeded its commissioned specification and the identification of equipment operating outside of the set control strategy. In essence, the savings were delivered through in-depth knowledge of the asset, improved control strategies and systems, and improved condition-based monitoring deployed through the closed-loop management system (Figure 1).