Engineers scent profit in "smart buildings"

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Apr 4, 2011, 15:50 GMT

Hanover, Germany - Engineering companies attending the Hanover Fair hailed Monday the business opportunities offered by 'intelligent' buildings that can plan their own air-conditioning use.

For the owners of big office and factory buildings, the payoff will come in energy savings.

For society, the benefit would be a reduction in gas emissions that cause global warming.

The European Union is leading the way in devising 'levers' that encourage people to save energy.

One is charging the highest electricity price at times of peak demand, and leaving it to utility and customer computers to figure out ways between themselves to spread the power load more evenly.

A presentation by Siemens, the big German electrical group, said, 'Buildings will receive energy price signals and forecast their own consumption.'

Joachim Kiauk, an executive at Siemens Switzerland, said the technology to do this had already been invented, but the negotiating software did not exist yet.

Siemens has commissioned research on it by a Munich university.

Its board decided last month to bundle all the group's urban renewal technologies in a new division, Infrastructure and Cities. The customers will be city governments and big landlords.

The world will have 26 Tokyo-style megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants each by 2015, Jochen Homann, a deputy German economics minister, said at the fair, which continues until Friday.

The focus is now on ending waste in big multi-storey buildings where small changes can yield big savings.

Skyscrapers and hospitals can massively reduce energy waste said Jan Ebert, an executive at Dutch-based building-technology contractor Imtech, which has 25,000 employees.

Imtech helped one Frankfurt computer centre save 45 per cent of its cooling and ventilation costs through a redesign, Ebert said.

At the fair, the world's biggest machinery trade show, Ebert described energy efficiency as the 'fuel of the future.'

Utilities are about as efficient as they will ever be, but householders and industrial customers waste energy with abandon.

Old-fashioned light bulbs convert only 5 per cent of their wattage to light. Many factories have electric motors running full speed even when not in use.

'We can utilize 60 per cent of the energy in fuel. We can transmit 95 per cent of it through power lines,' said Michael Weinhold, chief technology officer of Siemens Energy.

'So it hurts that a light bulb operates at only 5 per cent efficiency.'

Homann said at the fair that Berlin will soon apply another lever to achieve energy savings, stepping up its subsidies for energy-saving renovations of buildings. In cold Germany, 40 per cent of all energy is used to heat buildings or provide hot water.

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