buildings, energy, and smart devices

As I sit in these business school classes I inevitably try to tie them back to my experience of the world and my profession (architecture) and relate it to what I would like to do after school. One topic that is interesting to me is how the network of things may be a solution to some of our energy efficiency problems. Non-industrial commercial buildings account for 40% of energy usage, and much of that energy is un-monitored (except for the bill) and much of it is wasted. Building automation has been around for a long time, but hasn't been used to its fullest for a number of reasons. For one, all these systems typically have proprietary interactions and therefore do not play well together. So, you suffer lock-in using a single company's products or try to cobble together some Frankenstein, either of which your building engineers will resent. For another, building owners don't pay for utilities, tenants do, and it doesn't make financial sense for an owner to build or renovate a building using more capable but more expensive systems that don't add to their bottom line. Also, as eluded to before, the people operating the buildings don't want to deal with the extra complexity of managing and using a system that they don't understand, constantly have to fix, and generally makes their job harder without any benefit that they see. So how does the network of interlinked things fix this problem? It sort of depends on how this plays out. My hope is that the network will adopt some sort of web-based non-proprietary language of interaction and interface. This will make it easier to link sensors and other system parts together and is more likely to result in the human interface for monitoring and analyzing all these devices more user-friendly. Also, increasing publicity about energy usage and its costs and effects on the environment is making more potential tenants ask questions about how a building they are considering moving into fares in that area. As a result, energy efficiency is becoming more of an issue in getting a building leased.

Anyway, the trend that I see which hasn't been pointed out is for tech to reach into more mundane aspects of our lives, resulting in real societal benefit. As technology reaches saturation in markets where corporations find advantage (payroll/CRM/marketing) and in markets for things we don't really need but enjoy (music players/phones that tell you where your friends are), they will begin to penetrate that middle area that is useful but not glamorous (monitoring your home's electricity usage/adjusting your home's thermostat from work or from your phone/monitoring real-time water usage to detect leaks). In each of these cases the individual user receives benefit, however small, but as adoption becomes more pervasive, on the scale of a community or a city, the effect on total resource use will be immense.