Achieving carbon neutrality with analytics
Buildings IOT
Facilities within higher education institutions often face the challenge of integrating complex legacy building systems, leading to a lack of a unified source of truth for building data. In response to this issue, an Ivy League institution recently partnered with Buildings IOT. By leveraging Buildings IOT's Independent Data Layer (IDL), IOT Jetstream; and User Interface (UI), onPoint, the university was able to integrate, normalize, and develop a single source of truth for analyzing utility billing, energy consumption, and building performance.
Challenges:
The institution encountered the common challenge of consolidating data from multiple platforms and buildings, which consumed a significant amount of time. Their month-end operating procedures involved manually downloading CSV files from various legacy systems and analyzing energy data in a rudimentary manner. This outdated process needed to be transformed.
It also faced the complexity of managing utility billing data from multiple isolated accounts. The task of consolidating, analyzing, and ensuring accuracy across over 175 utility accounts monthly seemed nearly impossible. Moreover, there was a lack of correlation between utility consumption and electrical or HVAC data, making it challenging to contextualize abnormal readings.
What Buildings IOT did:
To address the challenges faced by the university, Buildings IOT deployed their Launchpad gateway. This solution exposed meter data to IOT Jetstream, where it underwent modeling, mapping, and normalization into a unified GraphQL API. Consequently, building data became accessible to third-party platforms, accounting systems, and the institution's IBMP, onPoint. The once labor-intensive process of analyzing and assessing energy consumption was replaced with a user-friendly interface in onPoint, featuring widgets, dashboards, and PDF reports.
Results:
Buildings IOT's Independent Data Layer (IDL) addressed these issues by integrating IOT Jetstream with the university's utility billing data through APIs. The data was then modeled alongside electrical consumption, resulting in a comprehensive source of truth. As a result, onPoint and other third-party platforms gained the ability to query a single API, enabling visualization and analysis of energy consumption that was previously scattered across multiple accounts and platforms.
By deploying Buildings IOT's combination of IOT Jetstream and onPoint, partners can ensure their platforms can adapt to changing needs and evolving technologies. Incorporating utility data, interval meter reading, and the potential for integrating additional building systems, Buildings IOT enables the creation of sustainable, flexible, and adaptable buildings that meet future requirements.
Designing campuses that can evolve and scale as needed contributes to a resilient and sustainable built environment capable of addressing future challenges.
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