Reinventing efficiency and sustainability with digital retrofitting

By Prabhu Ramachandran, CEO & Co-founder at Facilio Inc

In a world that is barreling towards dwindling resources, higher energy costs, unprecedented carbon emissions and global warming, buildings are set to become the largest consumers of power by 2030. Sustainability in building operations is no longer an afterthought or a choice. Older buildings with legacy technologies form a very large percentage of existing building stock. They consume more power, are inefficient and lack many of the technological advancements that make newer buildings more efficient to run.

Traditional thinking within the built environment will not move us towards ideal long-term zero carbon and sustainability goals. Today the built environment is faced with a challenge that grows bigger every day. Do you continue to run unsustainable and increasingly expensive older buildings, or invest in high-cost physical retrofits to bring older buildings up to speed on efficiency and sustainability?

Traditional thinking

Most real estate owners and FMs fall into the familiar trap of traditional thinking when it comes to efficiency and sustainability. It is a given that various equipment has to be replaced over time. But physical retrofits, which include HVAC and lighting, are a huge resource drain which often results in trying to avoid the inevitable as long as possible.

The problems with physical retrofits are numerous. Apart from a lack of data, usage visibility and access+control for multiple stakeholders, physical retrofits restrict the facility management ecosystem to clusters of independent systems. These work individually, but don’t communicate well enough with each other or allow owners to build more efficient collective systems with the data they glean from usage. Building owners, tenants and occupants need to have high visibility and get real-time information about all efficiency parameters in order for them to change usage habits to achieve sustainable operations. However, there is a perfectly good solution that will solve the problem of unsustainable older buildings without expensive physical retrofits.

Automation

Digital retrofitting involves automation systems that are centrally unified and work in tandem with physical retrofits, using a mix of IoT and machine learning systems to digitise legacy building systems. These optimise building efficiencies and come with the added advantage of advanced automated platforms that offer better operational insights and alerts ahead of time. Digital retrofits offer five very important advantages to real estate owners and facility management companies.

• Much lower costs with comparable returns in efficiency to physical retrofits.
• Less time and effort in installation than physical retrofits.
• Much quicker realisation of ROI compared to physical retrofits.
• The ability to customise and enhance building operations with modular platforms that offer full control and deeper insights into data generated by individual systems.
• Bringing all individual systems together onto a single platform that can collate disparate data, crunch that data with analytics, and offer exceptional insights into operations.

Digital retrofits are the obvious way ahead for an industry that is struggling to find the right direction towards achieving net zero carbon energy usage and sustainable operations. With their unique ability to turn even legacy systems into smoothly performing and efficient operating platforms, digital retrofits offer a way forward for those on the fence when it comes to upgrading the infrastructure in older buildings.

Technology has evolved to an extent that it can today put us in complete control of the most important philosophy in facilities management; It’s not about monitoring what is right, it’s about knowing what is going wrong, preferably as early as possible. And, this is where advanced analytics and digital operations platforms can help turn available data into useful information that you can act on.

Sustainable building operations

If we are to build a world in which buildings are carbon neutral, we need to begin looking at how invested we are in adopting facility management platforms that harness the best of technologies to automate, enhance and drive sustainable building operations. The need of the hour in our march to a zero-carbon world are tools and platforms that can manage all your existing technology, infrastructure, data, and add the power of data-driven analytics to it. It’s time we harnessed the power of technology and digital retrofitting to build the greener world every one of us deserves.