The greatest barrier to adoption of sustainability-oriented technology isn’t the investment expenditure or lack of innovative solutions, according to Enovity principal Jonathan Soper (pictured below right with principal Greg Cunningham). Many of the buildings he and his team are enlisted to work on already have sophisticated infrastructure. The challenge is properly leveraging that technology to promote sustainability.
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These systems go neglected or underutilized when they prove too complex or foreign for Operations and Maintenance teams to effectively use.
O&M staff may be missing the requisite training to fully leverage a building’s systems toward sustainability goals, and are often reactive when confronted with issues or initiatives. This is because O&M's highest priorities are equipment functionality and maintaining occupants’ comfort. Energy usage becomes a secondary concern. Enovity empowers O&M teams to be proactive.
“Enovity takes a holistic approach, encompassing O&M and sustainability goals,” Jonathan tells us. “Although we will often work with existing systems, my colleagues and I are at our most effective when we can take a cradle-to-grave approach and be involved in building design, construction, delivery and continued operation. Consultants can be ineffective because they don’t usually commit to consistent, long-term involvement throughout the building’s life cycle.”
Advanced software helps Enovity forward this mission. Enovity just launched an energy analytics software platform called FM Power for tracking performance of automated processes on an ongoing basis.
This is part of Enovity’s “top down” method that tracks usage on a macro scale and deploys predictive algorithms that take data recorded in 15-minute increments, and compare the numbers to a historical usage graph, pinging the appropriate people with alerts when these deviate by a certain percentage.
Enovity also employs a “bottom up” strategy, monitoring individual HVAC systems, which lets the firm drill down to address specialized issues. An anomaly report is automatically generated to indicate something is amiss. “The tolerance threshold is tailored to each room in each building,” Jonathan says. “So the temperature window for a data center can be made extremely narrow and the humidity control highly sensitive.”
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