By 2025, they will be the single largest energy consumers and greenhouse gas emitters
Rich Lechner, Business Times 5 Aug 09;
BUILDINGS have always been much more than roofs over our heads. Over the last century, as towers of steel reached higher into the sky and homes sprawled farther and farther into the surrounding landscape, our buildings not only housed burgeoning urban populations and growing economies - they also served as symbols of modernity and progress.
Unfortunately, today's offices, factories, stores and homes are also symbols of something else - waste and pollution. In the US, buildings consume 70 per cent of all electricity, up to 50 per cent of which is wasted.
Lights blaze and air conditioners hum in empty offices at night, and lawn sprinklers turn on even during a rainstorm. Commercial buildings lose as much as 50 per cent of the water that flows into them. By 2025, buildings will be the single largest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouse gasses on our planet.
But on a smarter planet we can think about buildings differently - seeing homes not just as living spaces, but as living systems; seeing offices not just as static works.
In a smart building, systems are not managed separately - they interoperate. Thousands of sensors can monitor everything from motion and temperature to humidity, precipitation, occupancy and light. The building doesn't just coexist with nature - it harnesses it. Smart buildings can reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions by 50 per cent to 70 per cent and save 30 per cent to 50 per cent in water usage.
Although today most attention is focused on smart homes, some of the most dramatic progress is being achieved in commercial developments around the world.
The St Regis hotel in Shanghai integrated 12 sub-systems to create one intelligent building, with a ratio of energy costs to revenue below 5 per cent (compared to 8 per cent for other five-star hotels). GIB-Services in Switzerland is using excess heat from its data centre to heat a local public swimming pool.
A mining company in Canada is using its excess data centre heat to warm its warehouses during the cold Canadian winters. IBM's own green data centre in Boulder, Colorado, has replaced energy greedy air-conditioning with cooling from the air outside, which can be used for up to 75 per cent of the year, contributing up to 50 per cent in annual energy savings.
In Singapore, the city-state aims to have at least 80 per cent of the buildings to achieve the BCA Green Mark Certified rating by 2030. A target set for Singapore's built environment by the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Sustainable Development (IMCSD), the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) rolled out its 2nd Green Building Masterplan in April 2009 to achieve this.
The roadmap sets out specific initiatives to achieve a truly sustainable built environment in Singapore by 2030 where when fully implemented, the 2nd Green Building Masterplan will reap annual savings of $1.6 billion in terms of energy cost reductions. The first Green Building Masterplan emphasising on new buildings and those undergoing major retrofitting was launched in 2006.
In addition, to nurture and meet Singapore's strong demand for a new 'green collar' workforce to design, build, operate and maintain green building systems and infrastructure in the future, the BCA academy offered a new masters degree for green building professionals in March 2009, in partnership with the University of Nottingham's School of the Built Environment.
The course is welcomed by the hundred-odd green building practitioners and graduating students that BCA Academy surveyed recently. On postgraduate training in sustainable development, an overwhelming 93 per cent of them endorsed the need for such training opportunities.
Ninety per cent of the respondents believed that there will be high demand for such courses and 68 per cent expressed a strong interest in pursuing graduate studies in sustainable development.
Keen professionals also receive 90 per cent funding of course fees. On this end, we applaud BCA's efforts in pushing Singapore's green agenda, specifically the city's green building visions. And for a glimpse of what is possible through a smarter approach, consider the GreenSpaces office park in Delhi, India, on which construction will begin this year. It aims to be the world's greenest and most energy-efficient commercial building, through such innovations as 100 per cent waste and water reclamation, instrumentation and interconnection of all systems, recharging ports for electric cars, and ventilated chairs.
It even plans to 'grow' its own oxygen and remove harmful compounds from the air through the strategic use of indoor vegetation - which doesn't just help the environment; it also helps people think and be more productive. An earlier prototype was rated the healthiest building in Delhi by the Indian government.
In the 20th century, people marvelled at what could be built by filling our buildings with steel. In the 21st, let's see what new heights - and reduced footprints - we can achieve by filling them with intelligence.
The writer is vice-president, energy & environment, IBM. He is in Singapore to speak at the Creating Business Value by Implementing Sustainable Development roundtable organised by the World Environment Center, headquartered in Washington, DC, and the Singapore Environment Council, held today. The organisers hope the roundtable stimulates innovative thinking and demonstrates practical business solutions to major societal challenges
