Networked Enterprise Featured Article

Energy efficiency in building technology has been getting a lot of press lately, and with good reason. In New York City, for instance, 80 percent of its carbon emissions come from commercial buildings. Making buildings more efficient can play a big role in helping the environment—and reducing costs.

One notable example of an energy-efficient building is the Edge, a 430,000 square foot office building in Amsterdam that recently received the highest score ever recorded by global sustainability building assessor, the Building Research Establishment (98.36 percent efficient, for those who are curious).

The Edge is energy neutral, partially the result of solar panels on the roof and every other surface of the southern side of the building not sporting a window. The solar panels create enough energy for all the electricity needs of the building, as well as for the Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage system installed 130 meters below ground that provides heating and cooling for the building. It also uses LED lighting to cut down on light costs.

But there’s more than just solar technology to improve the energy use within a building, as many government buildings are finding. Global manufacturer, Panduit, offers a range of techniques that government and private industry can use to make more efficient buildings.

One interesting technique is a raised floor system that can be deployed throughout a building to enable under-floor air distribution to every location, providing climate control to employees via workstation vents.

Another technique is Panduit’s Unified Physical Infrastructure approach. UPI, as it is called, takes typically disparate and segregated systems such as communications, computing, control, power, and security, and aligns them into a single, agile unified physical infrastructure that minimizes energy use while also enabling flexibility.

The integration of business operations and services addresses power, space and thermal management needs that cut across the IT department, manufacturing operations and facilities management.

UPI improves energy efficiency and power use, and reduces life-cycle costs with an eye toward sustainability.

With buildings accounting for so much energy use, especially government buildings, buildings like The Edge and technologies such as Panduit’s UPI and raised floor system are breaths of fresh air that others would do wise to note.