Smarter buildings: reality or day-dreaming?

And with more people moving to live and work in cities, there is an urgent demand for smarter, more sustainable cities.” 

A city is like the human body. Our body is made up of various organs and parts – brain, veins, heart, lungs etc. Similarly a city is also made up of various systems – roads, bridges, public transportation, sewage, gas, electricity, water treatment and irrigation, and last but not least, public and private buildings. 

In the human body, if one organ keeps secreting something that does not belong to it and is not healthy for the whole system, then eventually the whole body system might fail and the person succumb to illness. The same is also true for a city. 

One of the components of a city I think we should focus on is buildings. I am sure that not everyone knows how much buildings contribute to straining the sustainability, energy efficiency and capacity level of a city, but it is believed that for a country like the US alone, buildings account for 70 per cent of all energy use and 38 per cent of all carbon emissions.

That is the reason why US President Barack Obama introduced the “Better Buildings Initiative” in 2011. The proposal was intended to make commercial buildings 20 per cent more energy efficient over the next decade by catalysing private sector investment through a series of incentives to upgrade offices, stores, schools and other municipal buildings, universities, hospitals, and other commercial buildings. 

According to this initiative, there are various approaches that can help facilitate participants to move forward, including tax incentives for building efficiency, more financing opportunities for commercial retrofits, new competitive grants to local governments to encourage upgrades and attract private sector investment, and providing more workforce training in areas such as energy auditing and building operations.

The last approach is the one that interests me because with the rate of technological advancement we are looking at in current time, I am certain that this should be the priority everyone should focus on. 

As I said earlier, a city is like a human body. The buildings are like our organs. Annually, we go to see a doctor for a check-up. What we get to know from the medical report is various layers of information that tell us if anything is working fine or if anything is worth getting probed more after further examination. The same should also go for buildings. What happens in your building every day? How much water and energy are you using? Today, most businesses and residents find this out by looking at last month’s utility bills. 

This is where smarter building technologies can help everyone work toward this initiative by making it possible to better “listen” to the abundance of information emitted from buildings. I am not talking about sci-fi day-dreaming but I am talking about the actual technology that is currently utilised in the real world. There is a tool called “Pulse” that has been developed by a research institute in Australia. “Pulse” can actually offer building operators daily feedback on building performance so they know what works and what can be improved.

How does “Pulse” work? According to the developer, this tool looks at historic temperature, humidity, and energy-use data over the past year to come up with an equation that explains the relationship of energy use to weather in any given building. The analysis of data is then sent on daily basis to the building manager who, as a result, gets more timely feedback to fine-tune the building. For example, a manager can look at a spike in energy use, investigate more deeply, and find that the heating and cooling systems were conflicting at a certain time during the day. The software yields efficiency improvements between 5-10 per cent, according to the study.

If we look at the total environment of buildings for a city like Bangkok, I would say efficiency improvements of 5-10 per cent is something massive.

This is just an example of how smarter buildings will be able to use resources more intelligently, leading to reduced costs and emissions and ultimately to smarter, more efficient cities. So, I think it is time that everyone should embrace smarter buildings if we hope to build a more sustainable future.

However, I am afraid I have to end this article in a bitter tone. Smarter buildings? Here in Bangkok, we are still struggling with office and residential buildings not yet fitted with properly functioning fire alarm and smoke detectors. I am sure we all still remember recent fires in one office building and a hotel in the Sukhumvit area and I am sure we all know too well why these happened and how injury and death could have been easily prevented. But when we can’t still convince ourselves to respect and comply with codes and regulations that are universally accepted and even compulsory, trying to make our cities smarter and more sustainable might not be on top of the priority list of things we want to achieve.