Building Smarter Buildings

If you’ve visited this blog with any frequency, you know that I’ve visited a few cities around the globe in my time — four of them in the last week alone (Stuttgart, Madrid, Milan, and now Las Vegas).

For several years, I lived in a big city (New York), and opted in 2001 to move to a smaller, but still vibrant, city, Austin, Texas, where I worked for several years on Tivoli’s Web site (see today’s CNN Morning show for a feature on how Austin’s economy has thrived during the recession!)

With an estimated 60 million people around the world moving into cities each year, experts predict population in the world’s cities are going to double by 2050. As populations grow, civic leaders and businesses alike are looking for ways to help cities and their buildings cope.

Too often today, many of the systems that constitute a building — heat, water, sewage, electricity — are managed independently and, typically, inefficiently.

Buildings alone are a source of huge waste.  They account for 70 percent of all energy use and 38 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S.  That’s a lot of hot air!

That means, ultimately, that each year buildings emit more harmful CO2 emissions into the environment than do our vehicles (and as Al Gore mentioned in this morning’s Pulse keynote).

The culprits leading to such inefficiencies are varied: Poor planning and maintenance, inadequate energy management, the heating or cooling of unused space, and the inability to collect and analyze operational information.

Today, IBM and Johnson Controls have partnered in a joint initiative called Smart Building Solution, which combines the power of business analytics from IBM with the building technology and energy efficiency solutions of Johnson Controls to help address some of these inefficiencies.

This partnership is intended to help improve operations, lower costs, and reduce energy and water use in buildings and will be targeted at public sector, education, and large commercial real estate owners and industrial facilities.

Read more about this expanded partnership between IBM and Johnson Controls in this post by earth2tech.