How to Achieve Energy Efficiency in Smart Buildings
Thursday, 27th October 2022
The way we build—and the way we maintain our buildings—has a massive impact on the health of our planet and on the amount of energy we use. Across the world, it is estimated that 40% of all carbon emissions are created by the built environment.
As a result, for companies that want to improve their ESG score, meet their net zero goals, and reduce their carbon footprint, making buildings energy efficient is the best place to start. And whatever your goal, smart buildings—connected spaces that use technology to promote productivity, efficiency, and better business decisions—are a crucial tool in your strategy.
At Infogrid, we’re a leader in this new technology. Using the world’s smallest IoT sensors, we can help you monitor and improve the way your buildings use energy and manage waste. For example, with our smart building solution, we help one client save 800 tonnes of carbon every year.
In this article, we want to show you how to achieve energy efficiency in smart buildings. And we take you through how Infogrid can help you too.
How smart buildings use technology to drive efficiency
A smart building is any type of built environment—from an office to a warehouse to a home—that uses technologies to drive efficiencies.
They are most commonly seen in the workplace. And that’s because they bring distinct advantages. By connecting your space to tools that can monitor, analyse, and improve the way that buildings run, you can make efficiencies on energy, boost employee happiness and productivity, and bring costs down.
Typically, the Internet of Things (IoT) is at the heart of smart buildings. Or, more accurately, IoT is the technology that makes buildings smart. Simply, it helps you get more insight from the objects in a building—from its pipes to lighting to air conditioning.
At Infogrid, we deploy IoT sensors across buildings to provide organisations with real-time insight into energy consumption, maintenance, air quality, pipe function, cleanliness, and more. This way, you can understand the health of your buildings instantly and remotely, and immediately put in place strategies to make it more efficient.
Let’s show you how it works in a little more detail:
How smart buildings work with Infogrid
We help you boost your building intelligence by extracting data from the environment and turning it into actionable insights you can use to improve energy efficiency. Infogrid’s Healthy Building System works through three main steps:
Smart sensors. We’re at the forefront of the smart building industry thanks to our smart sensors. Easy-install, zero-maintenance, and the smallest available worldwide, they can help you drive energy efficiency by providing data on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) usage, lighting needs, or water usage.
Artificial intelligence. Our sensors provide data that is fed through AI algorithms to deliver targeted, actionable insights into your energy usage and inefficiencies.
A single data hub. No matter the size of your building portfolio, your building data is delivered onto a single screen—so you can receive essential information wherever you are.
But they don’t just promise improvements in efficiency. Explore our platform to find out more about what Infogrid can do for you.
How can smart buildings drive energy efficiency?
Smart building technologies like Infogrid help you drive energy efficiency by giving you insight into your energy consumption and showing you strategies to improve.
And the results can be phenomenal. One study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found that simply by monitoring and automating three things—your HVAC systems, building’s lighting, and window shading—you can make energy savings of 30% to 50%. And by automating only HVAC and lighting, you can save 23% of the energy you use.
The frustrating reality is that conventional buildings simply aren’t very efficient. They rely on manual monitoring (if they monitor energy use at all), ad-hoc optimisations such as opening windows, and unsystematic processes to manage energy usage. And when consumption patterns are affected by changing conditions and usage, wastage is inevitable.
However, as research clearly shows, by automating the systems across your buildings, you’ll make your buildings more efficient, keep your costs low, and limit your carbon footprint.
Here are just some specific ways that Infogrid can help.
How Infogrid achieves energy efficiency in smart buildings
Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC). Typically, HVAC is responsible for about 40% of a building’s total energy consumption. With Infogrid’s sensors, however, you can get clear insights into how your building is using your HVAC system, to inform more efficient processes.
For example, we helped one supermarket save $1.6 million a year on energy costs on their HVAC system alone—alongside 800 tons of CO2.
Lighting. Historically the biggest consumer of electricity in commercial buildings, lighting can be a significant motor of energy inefficiency.
With our Healthy Building System, you can optimise your light usage across your buildings, to respond to changing climate conditions and changing patterns of usage. This way, you’ll only use your lighting in spaces and at times that it’s really needed.
Pipe monitoring. A building’s piping system can be the common cause of maintenance issues and regulatory work—often demanding hours of time.
Instead, make all of these processes more efficient by investing in an automated pipe monitoring system. This can keep water wastage to a minimum, optimise temperatures, and help your reporting on health and safety issues such as legionella risk.
Our smart solution has helped a bank save $1 million a year on their water bill. And for one facilities management business, it’s reduced labour time by 81%.
Smart cleaning. Smart building systems can boost energy efficiency by tracking occupancy and space usage too—to power more intelligent cleaning processes.
Rather than having cleaning teams follow the same rota every day, with a smart usage monitoring system you can see which spaces have been used. This empowers cleaners to direct their energy to where it’s actually needed.
Air quality. Finally, a current challenge for businesses is balancing indoor air quality with energy efficiency. Ventilation systems—that will soon be mandatory in every commercial space in the UK—use a lot of energy. Knowing exactly when and where to use the system can help you prevent waste while ensuring the safety of your employees.
Energy efficiency in the workplace: What are the benefits for you?
While improving energy efficiency might sound just like another cost or task, investing in technologies that help drive energy efficiency has concrete benefits for everyone.
Attract and retain employees. In research for our Hybrid Workplace report, we found that energy efficiency can support efforts to attract and retain employees. 40% said they would stay in a company if it had a serious commitment to achieving net zero emissions.
Improve your ESG performance. Your environmental, social, and corporate governance performance (ESG) is one of the key metrics by which investors, employees, and other stakeholders will judge your brand. By ensuring that your environmental impact is as low as it can be, you’ll encourage investment.
Satisfy your customers. Studies show that clients and consumers are more likely to buy from you if you can prove that you’re performing well. For example, 66% of customers say that sustainability plays a part in their buying decisions.
Infogrid’s Smart Building System
At Infogrid, we can help you secure the energy efficiencies that your customers, employees, and investors demand. Book a demo to get started.