Kurt Karnatz participated in two moderated panel discussions at the 2015 IBcon on June 9th:
Understanding the Business Drivers: Why Do I Want A Smart Building Anyway?
Smart, connected, high-performance, sustainable, energy-efficient, intelligent buildings are being discussed everywhere. There is a great amount of technology to talk about, but before demonstration, review, analysis, RFI, or pilot, anyone considering a smart building project has to first as the question: Why? The short answer is, there are legitimate business drivers behind idea but they need to be better understood and articulated. Energy conservation, operational efficiency, enhanced occupant experiences, sustainability and ultimately financial optimization are at the center of the business driver discourse and will be discussed and debated in this session.
ENERGY OPTIMIZATION: What Does Continuous Commissioning Look Like?
Most of the big discussions over the past 2 years regarding 'extreme' HVAC efficiency in buildings have been around analytics. Analyze a great amount of new data from a wide range of buildings, and discover the problems to be addressed. The main problem is that, most systems, the detected faults required some level of action that is manual. The next logical step is for the system to be able to communicate in a bi-directional manner allowing for “tweaks” to be automatically made to the system in a continuous fashion…hence the term continuous commissioning. It is very important for those considering the development of an energy efficiency strategy to understand all the functional capabilities of a system.