How Can Smart Lighting Accelerate Smart Building Adoption?

amBX Smart Building partner, Molex, share their thoughts on how smart lighting can accelerate smart building adoption. We interviewed Cory Souders, who is the Business Development Manager at Molex Connected Enterprises. We discuss cost-saving vs user experience, the importance of focusing on occupant wellbeing, smart lighting on IT and IP infrastructure, and we get Cory’s opinion on how he sees the market accelerating.

Firstly, what do you think makes a building smart? 

Integrating all of the building systems together – lighting, shades, HVAC, meeting room management, etc. This enables the sharing of data between systems which allows us to make better decisions, but also by collecting and analysing that data, it allows us to provide actionable insights about how the building is being used, reveal any trends, expose any potential problems, and understand how they can be prevented in the future. 

Smart buildings and smart technology should be focused on occupants and optimising the user experience; however, all too often, the focus is on cost, which is obviously very important within a building, but really one addresses the other. A great experience for employees saves costs in recruitment and many other areas. What are your thoughts on cost-saving vs user experience? 

I think the two go hand in hand. We’ve seen numbers as high as 80% in energy savings when a good network lighting control system is installed, which is valuable and ecologically responsible, but I think a great user experience can also lead to greater cost savings not just on the energy side but on the real-estate side and on the productivity of the employees too. I always refer to the 3,30,300 rule, which means that energy costs are roughly $3 per sq. ft., real-estate costs approx. $30 per sq. ft. and employee costs are about $300 per sq. ft. So, although the energy savings are great, if we can make more efficient use of the office footprint and then increase employee satisfaction and productivity, that provides benefits by an order of magnitude greater than energy savings.

We recently conducted a survey on LinkedIn, which looked at the top drivers of smart buildings and the results were that health and wellbeing came in at number 2 and cost and energy-saving number 1. So, what are your thoughts on health and wellbeing? Where do you think that should sit within the consideration stage of smart buildings? 

I think we’re starting to see the WELL building standard overtake the LEED building standard. They are both good standards, but LEED was more energy focused and WELL is more focused around the building occupant. Just looking at the lighting world alone, good lighting can help prevent eye strain; it keeps circadian rhythms in sync and can even aid with cleaning protocols creating a healthy environment too. For comfort overall, integrating the shades, HVAC, lighting, etc., all create advantages for the occupants too. 

Molex is pioneering smart lighting on IT and IP infrastructure; can you tell us a bit more about what advantages this delivers for smart buildings? 

We integrate a network of sensors for occupancy, daylight saving, environmental, etc., and we can integrate and share that data with other building systems. The PoE lighting is also easily scalable; it uses low voltage; therefore, future changes are easy to make, but most importantly, it provides a future-ready backbone. More and more devices are coming online that are PoE, things like security cameras and access control, but I like to use the smartphone analogy to explain PoE. Smartphones haven’t changed too much over the years; the main infrastructure is the same, so when I want to add something new, e.g., controlling my garage door, I don’t need to change my phone; I just need to download the app and buy the required hardware. PoE gives you that same flexible infrastructure, which means it’s easy to add to in the future. 

In terms of data capture, which you briefly mentioned before, what do you think is the most effective way to gather data within a building? 

The best way to gather that data is through the sensors, which will provide a real-time view of what is going on in the building. Using lighting as the enable for this sensor network makes sense because the lighting is everywhere – this means we can get more data and more granular data. 

Analysing that data and being able to make predictions for the future is a huge advantage – we know what the lighting status is, we can estimate the lifetime of a fixture, we see what spaces are occupied, and we can plan our real-estate strategy based on those trends. In the COVID world, cleaning is a big topic, so we can see what areas get used more heavily; this can inform cleaning strategies. Also, integrating environmental sensors, things like air quality, humidity, temperature – being able to gather all of that and get a good idea of the health of the building is important. We can then automate responses for the future, so we can do things like task tuning of lights, time scheduling or predict our energy demand so we can do some load shedding and demand response based on that utilisation. 

You recently partnered with a company to be able to deliver light sanitation. Can you tell us some more about this? 

We partnered with a company called NextSense who have developed a technology that is UV free; it does not use the UV spectrum of light. It kills up to 99% of the COVID virus. Traditionally, most sanitation lighting solutions use UV-C, but this has some drawbacks surrounding health risks as a result of prolonged exposure. So NextSense found that using light in the visible spectrum (400-420 nm range) has the ability to kill a wide range of organisms more safely than using UV. You can find out more about that here. 

Have you got any example projects you could talk about to give us a real-life understanding of how some of these technologies work in practice?

We have quite a few installations, but one I’d like to highlight is an installation in a commercial office space that was actually built in 1985. They reworked the space that traditionally had private offices around the perimeter of the building and communal office space on the interior. They flipped that around so that now there is more flexible, open office space, they incorporated PoE lighting, they have tuneable white fixtures, which add to the health and wellbeing aspect we discussed earlier with bio-dynamic circadian lighting, which helps with productivity. 

We also used daylight harvesting techniques, we integrated with the BMS, with the room scheduling system and with the AV system, creating one big cohesive solution that shares data. The results are a cleaner, open environment that integrates all of the existing technologies and with PoE and has growth potential for the future too.

Another good example of an installation we worked on is in Norway. It is labelled the world northernmost net-positive building. It’s got a unique footprint, it’s built for views, it’s got large solar panels on the roof and a giant light tube in the centre of the building - making use of the available natural energy for further savings. It also has weather sensors, so the indoor environment mimics the outdoor environment. Also, as I said previously, having that ability to link everything together also future-proofs the building, meaning it has the ability to be scaled up.  

Being able to retrofit a current building is also more environmentally friendly when you think about how much carbon is involved in the construction process, and PoE enables this retrofit process.

Yes, technology is always growing, and PoE makes the building ready for that. 

North America is a large target market for Molex; I’m curious to understand whether there are any trends or needs from customers that you are seeing emerging there at the moment? 

The call for smart buildings is growing in terms of energy-saving but also the future-proofing and forward-looking technology as well. I’ve seen estimates for market growth of around $50-60 bn globally, and only about half of that is in the US. It goes back to that data usage; we all know data is king right now, enabling building owners and landlords to have that data and interact with that data is essential for future growth. There is a demand for smart buildings in healthcare and in lab environments; we can use temperature and humidity sensors; they can be remotely monitored, and the building can send you an alert if that drifts out of range. Data centres are also another growing sector for smart technology. I see demand response and load shedding capability as really key for energy saving, and we can automate that process within a smart building. 

Looking into the future, I’ve seen requests for indoor wayfinding, asset tracking – being able to locate assets quickly, is especially useful in an environment such as a hospital. The future-ready infrastructure makes all of this available.

Is there anything else in particular that you think is driving the demand for smart buildings? 

As we experience the comforts and conveniences of technology at home, we will see that transfer over to office space as well. It’s definitely an education process; we need to incorporate all of the things I have talked about in the design of buildings going forward. As the cost comes down, that will also drive growth. Living in a post covid world, I think there will be changes in the real estate market; there’s going to be more intelligence needed about the buildings - how they’re used and operated.