Looking forward to a more sustainable future

Recent advances in 3D visualisation, combined with AI automation, are providing facility managers with unprecedented insights into how the layout of their buildings influences a huge range of factors – including energy consumption, maintenance and sustainability – as Martin Huber explains.

Sustainability isn’t new. However, it’s only more recently that organisations have come to view it as more than just a moral essential but a business imperative. And it’s easy to see why. According to the UN, the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting a global temperature rise to 1.5 °C remains worryingly out of reach.  At the same time, frequent weather extremes continue to push communities around the world to the brink.

To meet global sustainability goals, the buildings sector is coming under increased pressure  to play its part and significantly improve its environmental performance. After all, it’s estimated that buildings consume 30% of the world’s energy and are responsible for 40% of CO₂ emissions. Achieving a net-zero emissions scenario by 2050 requires 85% of the existing building stock to be retrofitted over the next three decades, along with all new buildings to be zero-carbon from 2030 onwards.

While certainly no easy feat, the good news is that there is, at least in part, a solution – enter the ever-mounting business case for the digital evolution of the building industry.

The big picture

Of course, most organisations will already understand the importance of investing in digitalisation including future-proof technology platforms and up-to-date solutions.

Take, for example, the latest advances in design and visualisation. Through Building Information Modelling (BIM) coupled with spatial data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are now able to gain greener buy-in from suppliers through a cultural shift enabled by increased collaboration, empowering stakeholders to root out waste, highlight inefficiencies and question poor design decisions through early engagement and greater visibility of information. Shared digital representations allow teams to visualise, simulate, and analyse design and construction decisions in real time, ensuring alignment of vision and reducing costly error. Innumerable tweaks can be made to marry what would work best in theory with practical reality.

But there is an opportunity to take it further. Through this total ‘big picture’ visibility it becomes possible for operators to gain access to high resolution energy consumption data from each building, room, as well as individual technologies and assets, in real time. Careful processing and analysis of this data can provide the invaluable insights needed to identify the most energy intensive processes or areas of a building and make realistic changes which offer a route to greater energy efficiency.

In this way, it can also help to bring a sustainable strategy to life. For most operators the end goal is to save as much energy and carbon impact as possible without sacrificing the quality of an operation. Through a digitalised approach operators are able to view the potential savings of green technologies during the entire life of a building to understand the long-term ROI. Put this principle into the context of bigger investments, such as wind, solar, power factor correction and battery storage, and the potential becomes massive in terms of reducing the risk of inefficient design or the bolting on of ‘eco technologies’ that are inherently less cost-effective in later stages.

For retrofit or refurbishment schemes, this approach makes it easier for building owners to do end-of-life demolition assessments to encourage renovation, reuse and adaptive use of buildings, and whole-life embodied carbon assessments to drive design and planning decisions. Amid a growing need for the industry to ‘only build if necessary’ this continues to prove a game changing tool in validating the case for circular practices while building confidence amongst investors and stakeholders

Future focus

And that’s just the start. As the future building concept pivots to intelligent, flexible and sustainable construction, we’ll see an accelerated shift towards visualisation and automation in order to reduce planning and building times, while connecting green energy sources.

Eventually, the majority of buildings will be embedded with smart devices and beacons that will monitor energy consumption and a range of other factors in real time. These advanced software solutions will cover everything from temperature, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), lighting and fire detection through to predictive maintenance, occupancy and structural health. 

When combined with automation and visualisation platforms, we’ll have an incredibly powerful set of tools to create ultra-efficient and highly responsive ‘living buildings’ that will use considerably less energy and resources to maintain. With AI, spatial data and 3D visualisation advancing hand-in-hand, the speed and precision of room and building design and ongoing maintenance are only going to accelerate. In the not so distant future, machine learning algorithms will be powerful enough to create design proposals with optimal efficiency.

A few years from now, driven by a need to decarbonise and secure energy resilience, many industries will pursue self-generation through renewable investments. But while this approach can enable operators to produce much of the electricity they need locally, it does bring new complexity in ensuring stability and alignment between generation and demand. Digitisation again has the answer, providing the insight needed to optimise the generation, supply, and storage of decentralised resources according to market and other external patterns.

This new era of building will sit within the wider emergence of smart, digitalised cities – where every building, room, and asset forms part of an interconnected web designed to ensure better resource use and less emissions.

Going greener

Yes, it is a challenging time for the building sector as it embarks on the journey towards decarbonisation. But it’s also an opportunistic one. By taking advantage of the latest technological breakthroughs, firms can unleash greater carbon savings, benefit from new capabilities and ensure they remain primed for the not-too-distant future concept.

■  Martin Huber is CEO and co-founder of Amrax