SatchNet Electronic Systems

History of Building Automation

A few decades ago the term building automation system (BAS) was specifically used for HVAC controls, as the sophisticated and customized design of the HVAC system in each project required a different operation sequence. By the time designers started expanding the concept of building automation to include lighting; studies were confirming that HVAC and lighting consume about 80% of the energy bill of any building.
The term building automation has expanded to managing and integrating all the facilities in the building such as HVAC, lighting, fire alarm and life safety, security, access control, CCTV systems, power management and utility metering.
Integrated building automation systems are becoming more and more popular. The increased demand for software solutions to manage and make use of the huge amount of data coming from all the above mentioned subsystems means that IT professionals are now heavily involved in the building automation industry. Also, traditionally the building automation  software used to be closed software where the client could not make use of, or expose, the BAS data to other third party software for enterprise use. This is changing.

Integrating Building Automation with Back Office and Enterprise Applications

 The involvement of IT professionals in the building automation industry was the first step towards exposing and making use of BAS data. The IT world is always looking for standardization and open connectivity between all enterprise applications. Clients started realizing the great benefits from having the information they need from the BAS system in an easy-to-read and standard format for their enterprise use, especially when it comes to energy consumption and facility management.
This has been achieved by converting energy and facility information into open databases such as Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) or SQL or Extended Markup Language (XML).
Other uses of open connectivity are utility billing and computerized maintenance management (CMMS) or asset management, as well as having internet connectivity to your plant as nearly all systems now are web based and built on web standards.

Adding Value through Convergence

The benefits, or added values, of integrating building automation with back office and enterprise applications are unlimited.
Whether your facility is a hotel, bank, university, museum, hospital, airport, pharmaceutical plant or a commercial office, you will definitely benefit from having all your energy usage and consumption data in a format that can be customized and imported easily into monitoring and targeting software. This gives the management team a clear understanding of the amount of energy consumed and enables them to make accurate decisions based on actual facts rather than assumptions.
This process definitely reduces energy bills. Facility management and facility operation has become much easier. Through integrating all subsystems such as HVAC, lighting, security, access control, CCTV, life safety, power management and utility metering into one common, standard platform, only one common user interface is required for the building operator. This cuts down the training costs and makes the building operator more efficient since more time can be devoted to managing the facility rather than operating the facility. All alarms and logged data will be in the same format for all subsystems.
Traditionally, CMMS systems used to trigger the maintenance work orders based on calendar or time schedules, this was time consuming and expensive and in so many cases the planned maintenance was not really required. By integrating CMMS systems with building automation, the maintenance work order is triggered based on real time data such as actual operating hours of a fan motor, or an alarm is triggered to warn of a dirty filter that needs cleaning or replacing.
Recent studies and market research show that 36% of initial investment and 45% of maintenance costs for building systems can be reduced if the concept of integrated building systems is adopted.

The utility billing concept has dramatically changed through IT convergence with building automation.

Traditionally, the building owner or operator used to charge the tenant for utility consumption based on the m2 of the rental space. This was not an accurate calculation and does not reflect the actual consumption of the tenant from the overall utility. Through intelligent metering, the actual consumption of each tenant is measured and utility bills are generated through billing software that is fully integrated with the metering stations via the building automation system, in a format that is easily converted to data that can be processed by the accounts department.
Web based systems are today’s revolution for the building automation industry where you can monitor and control your facility, from anywhere anytime.

The Potential for LON

LON technology and the LonTalk® protocol made the first steps in system integration possible. It is the only reliable and easy market solution for realizing field level integration between different manufactures and different subsystems. This is due to the true openness of the protocol. At the management level all LON data is easily converted through standard LONMARK IP routers to any enterprise application, providing seamless integration with IT standards and enterprise applications.

System Integrators in Jordan

The term “system integrator” is not used in Jordan yet and still needs time to develop. The market depends heavily on authorized distributors for manufactures to do the integration work. All of this is the responsibility of one manufacturer, who is only trained on their own products and is not a real system integrator. Work needs to be done to change the image in the market and to make clear that the system integrator, and not the brand name or product, is the guarantee for a successful project.

LON Case Study

When this happens, we will see more and more open building automation systems with connections to back office, enterprise systems and other IT applications being implemented in Jordan like, for example, a recent prestigious project where the BAS system was installed on a flat LON system. TAC Invensys products were used. The system comprised of 32 MNL-800 LON plant controllers, 110 MNL-200 fan coils and heat pumps controllers and integration with 7 Danfoss VLT 6000 drives with LON FTT-10 cards. All the data is presented on Wonderware In-Touch graphical HMI through an Echelon LNS-DDE server. In addition,
technical staff are now alerted of alarms as soon as they occur. This was achieved by integrating the Wonderware In-Touch software with a RAM (Remote Alarm Software) package from TAC-Satchwell that sends alarms to mobile phones.

Summary

IT convergence with building automation is a perfect fit. With increased energy costs and security needs and the demanding requests for more data from the field level, we will definitely see unsurpassed development on the utilization of the IT standards and protocols in the building automation industry.

Contact
Firas Obeido (CEM, LCP)
Managing Director
SatchNet Electronic Systems
Firas.obeido@satchnet.com
Amman – Jordan

Energy Management Advisory Service

Today Pike Research announced the launch of its new Energy Management Advisory Service, a subscription-based information tool that provides market intelligence and strategy insights for companies seeking to more efficiently manage the energy consumption of their own organizations, as well as those looking to leverage information technologies and managed services for enterprise energy management applications.

“Enterprise energy management is an important new convergence zone in which a diverse set of individual technologies and applications is coming together to form a broader suite of energy products and services,” says Pike Research president Clint Wheelock. “These areas include building energy management systems (BEMS), corporate energy procurement and management, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, demand response and other energy efficiency services, and carbon management. As energy management tools evolve over the next few years, and are increasingly integrated into larger smart grid systems, they will change the face of how businesses purchase and consume energy.”

As part of its Energy Management service, Pike Research’s industry analysts offer timely and actionable market insights, covering specific technology and business sectors as well as overall market conditions and trends. Research reports include an in-depth examination of business models, technology issues, policy and regulatory factors, the competitive landscape, and market sizing, segmentation and forecasting.

Key Forecasts and Findings

• Information technology (IT) companies will play a key role in energy management. Relative newcomers to the energy space, such as Cisco, IBM, Oracle, and SAP, will be important power players in the new world of enterprise energy management.
• The Energy Service Company (ESCO) industry will more than triple in size between 2010 and 2020, and Pike Research anticipates that as market consolidation continues, building equipment manufacturers will gain market share at the expense of pure-play and utility-owned ESCOs. During the next few years, the firm anticipates that ESCOs will expand their presence beyond the institutional and federal sectors, and into the private commercial building market.
• The building energy management systems (BEMS) sector in the United States will increase from $900 million in 2010 to $2.4 billion annually by 2016, under an average forecast scenario.
• The global market for carbon management software and services will grow from $705 million in 2010 to $5.7 billion by 2017, a 35% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Of total revenue in this area, about two-thirds will be in the professional services segment, and one-third will be spending on software.
• Pike Research forecasts that the demand response (DR) market in the United States will expand from $1.4 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion by 2020, under a moderate growth scenario. The firm anticipates that the largest opportunities for DR will be in the commercial and industrial (C&I) sector.

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“Facts are apt to alarm us more than the most dangerous principles”

Building system alarms are not just nuisances; they affect system performance, equipment lifecycles, life safety, regulatory compliance issues, energy consumption, lost occupant production and building technicians’ efficiencies. To really handle alarms you need a detailed plan, the development of operational processes and a good suite of software tools. What follows are a few observations as well as an overview of the major activities and issues involving an alarm management plan. System Integration Plays a Part  

  An alarm management system for a building has to incorporate alarms from multiple systems. Technicians can’t jump from one workstation to another to address simultaneous alarms from different systems. Alarms for all building systems should be integrated into one alarm management program to provide a comprehensive, enterprise-wide view of systems’ status; what we would call providing an operator with full “situational awareness”. The enterprise system may only have “read” capabilities for some systems, such as fire alarm, but the building-wide or building portfolio view is required and will require some integration of system alarm data.

It sounds and is laborious but these are the details and a foundation of any alarm management plan. You start with: 

 Develop the basis or the rules on which the alarms will be prioritized and classified. Underlying the rules should be an assessment of the potential consequences of an alarm: is it related to life safety, critical operations, energy consumption, government regulations, etc.? What are the potential impacts and business risks with each alarm? Determine which alarms are necessary Apply the prioritization and classification rules to each alarm Reconfigure alarm settings if needed (delay time, deadbands, etc.) For each alarm determine the response of the building technician or operator. Identify the roles and responsibilities of each person involved as well as the work process from alarm notification to resolution and documentation. Include hierarchy rules for escalation.

Average Alarm Rate Per Facility Technician – This could be alarms per day or per week and could indicate whether an individual is overloaded with alarms or not. It also provides a means to compare workload or productivity between technicians.

As a facility manager, you’ve got many opportunities to reduce the impact of utilities on your bottom line. In addition to buying utilities at the lowest cost, you need to recover as much of the utility expenses as possible. This can be accomplished through a utility cost recovery lease clause, or, internally, through a chargeback system. Various methods are used for utility cost recovery. These methods are often subject to state laws. Before using them, the manager must ensure they are allowed.

Submetering

Submetering offers a way for landlords to earn a profit by charging tenants a higher rate for utilities than the rate that the landlord pays. The landlord purchases a utility through a master meter and has submeters installed for individual tenants in order to pass the charges on according to specific consumption.

The ability to submeter utilities varies from state to state. Some states prohibit submetering, while others encourage it as a green practice. States that prohibit submetering often allow temporary metering, called check metering or information metering. Such metering is sometimes used with energy rent inclusion to check the accuracy of estimates. In addition to staterestrictions, utility companies may have their own prohibitions.

Energy Rent Inclusion

In states that do not permit submetering, another option is to establish a lease provision charging additional rent for utility use. This provision is often called energy rent inclusion. With a provision for energy rent inclusion, the amount and cost of energy for each tenant or area is estimated, typically proportional to the rentable square footage. Estimates, often referred to as base rates, are established at initial occupancy, usually by an engineer or specialized consulting firm. They may be altered during occupancy to reflect changes in actual energy use and changes in energy costs.

Some lease clauses limit the amount charged to what the tenant would have paid at the applicable utility rate. When this type of clause exists, the local utility rate should be used as a guide.

Energy estimates are often inaccurate, especially over the long term. To guard against overcharging or undercharging, a balance should be tabulated. The estimated utility use for all tenants along with common areas should be totaled. That total should then be compared with the total amount recorded on the utility meter by the utilities serving the building.

Utility Cost Allocation

Another technique, utility cost allocation, is less costly than submetering. It requires less equipment—in some cases, no equipment at all.

One approach to utility cost allocation is to prorate utility costs by square footage occupied. When the character and hours of energy use are similar for all tenants, this can be a reasonable method. Each area to be billed is assigned a certain fraction of the total use of each utility. Every month, that same fraction is applied to the landlord’s utility bill to determine each tenant’s bill.

This method is fair only when utility use is uniform. When utility use is not uniform, some forms of surrogate measurement can be used in an attempt to estimate and assign utility use more fairly. These surrogate methods use such devices as hours-of-operation counters, temperature measurement, or flow measurement. Utility cost allocation is then adjusted according to the readings made by these devices. The totals from all the devices are gathered, and various formulas are used to set the fraction of utility cost allocated to each tenant.

Many state laws on submetering may also apply to utility cost allocation, so check your local laws.

Tenant Utility Auditing Firms

Some tenants that lease space in many locations employ independent utility auditing firms or have their own staff perform utility audits. More and more utility auditing firms are marketing their services to tenants. These firms usually work on a contingent-fee basis, sharing any refunds and reductions equally with the tenant. Every submetering or cost-allocation installation should be capable of withstanding the scrutiny of an independent audit. Submeter calibration and certification should be done periodically to ensure accuracy.

After-Hours Charges

Most leases state normal building operating hours, with specific provisions and charges for after-hours use. The most common charge for after-hours use is for heating and cooling. The landlord and tenant agree on a dollar figure or formula to be used. All too frequently, however, these charges do not cover the actual cost.

There are other factors that should be considered in after-hours charges. If tenants require heating and cooling, they also require power for lighting and equipment. The energy consumed should be included in the charges. Also, any additional energy consumed in common areas should be included. This is yet another reason why submetering is preferred; the exact amount of energy used can be calculated, allowing the owner to recoup all utility costs.

The facility manager should document after-hours charges to clearly show how the charges were set initially, as well as how charges are updated to reflect changes in utility and labor costs.

Excess Energy Use

Leases often have clauses to cover excess use of energy. Energy used by normal office equipment during normal office hours is included in the rent, but any special equipment or additional hours are billed separately to the tenant. This separate billing can be figured either by estimate or by submetering.

Another approach is to include a specified quantity of energy use, most often of electricity, in the rent. Monthly meter readings are taken through submetering the space. If the consumption exceeds specifications, an additional charge is applied.

Common-Area Cost Allocation

Although most leases have provisions describing how common-area costs are distributed to tenants, they rarely describe in detail how those costs are determined. The manager should maintain a documented and consistent method for common-area cost allocation when submetering is used.

When all common-area services are on individual meters directly from the utility company, these costs are easy to calculate. Simply total all of the common-area utility bills. The method for calculating the cost of that consumption must then be documented for each tenant.

If the common areas are not submetered, then the common-area consumption must be calculated. The consumption on the tenant submeters is subtracted from the total quantity bought, leaving the common-area use. Cost can be allocated by the same methods used when common-area consumption is submetered.

When the common-area cost includes central heating and cooling systems, an additional step must be taken. The consumption or revenue for after-hours use should be subtracted from the common area use so that tenants are not required to cover the cost of these systems when their buildings are unoccupied.

Utility Cost Escalation

In a building that is not submetered, utility cost escalation is usually determined as the amount that the current year’s cost exceeds the base year’s cost. In submetered buildings, there is no need to apply utility cost escalation, provided that the method for billing submeters follows the traditional procedures described above. If an alternative procedure is followed, it must be well documented and communicated to the tenants.