How Can Lighting Benefit Smart Building Platforms?
Jon Couch, Director of Product at amBX, shared his thoughts on our podcast series about why lighting control is often missing from smart building platforms and what the benefits of it being included are. Listen to the podcast here, or read on for a summary of the conversation.
Why has lighting historically not been part of smart building platforms?
Lighting control was more prevalent before LEDs, but LEDs provided such good energy savings that control became secondary. We are now seeing a resurgence in lighting control as buildings get smarter. However, the deployment of lighting control is much more siloed; smart building’s main focus is on BMS and HVAC in particular. In general, lighting is done, but it’s a separate option and is more often deployed without full integration. This means its full potential is not realised.
What is the benefit of lighting being integrated within a building platform?
Optimising the lighting system will save energy and improve the occupant's comfort level. The centralised collection of data into a holistic control solution provides new insight for smart building platforms. Knowledge of occupancy data collected by the lighting system can be shared and used by other systems such as HVAC to ensure it isn’t on when there isn’t anyone present. It also facilitates asset and building management and helps owners understand how their space is being used. It helps with the balancing of energy from a grid perspective and is beneficial for load sharing.
Buildings face pressure to show their ESG score and their improvement plan for the future. How can lighting add benefits here?
Legislation drives change; the requirement for certain types of businesses to present these scores is forcing the industry to take action and become more environmentally friendly.
Lighting cannot be left behind here. Many large businesses are struggling to gather all of their building data to create a picture of where they currently are and then project where they want to get to in the future. There are a couple of options these companies could adopt from a lighting perspective:
1 – Install meters to understand what is currently being used; however, this is a costly option and does not show what improvements could be made.
2 – Rip out all existing lighting and install a new system, but again, the cost of this can quickly become unmanageable, especially if an estate owner has a portfolio of buildings.
We have found that digital twins are very beneficial. In our case, having a lighting digital twin can offer the ability to map how a building is running now (and in a far more accurate way than just doing a lighting survey), but it also allows a forecast to be created which shows an owner where they could get to from a lighting energy and carbon perspective.
In a digital twin such as ours, you can add sensors, control logic, schedules and build it all in in a generic sense; it will then tell you what reductions you can achieve, and then the client can roleplay different scenarios, e.g., spend £xx on sensors and see what the result could be or go down a more low key route and compare the impact and outcome.
Systems with digital twins can really help these big platform providers add additional value that they can offer to their end customers. These energy goals definitely can’t be achieved if building owners don’t know how their building is operating now.
As lighting accounts for approximately 40% of total energy usage in a commercial building, it cannot be missing from ESG reporting.
What benefits can lighting add to the indoor farming market?
This market is not as mature as commercial real estate, but it is an emerging sector. In greenhouses, lighting is important, but they aren’t completely reliant as there is some natural light too; however, in vertical farms, it is very important; without it, crops would not grow. But, currently, manual control of lighting is common, which means farms are not optimised.
Data is key for incremental gains to be achieved. A common data ontology across both indoor farming and commercial buildings (as well as other sectors) is essential as we move forward and will reduce cost and therefore make automated smart platforms more attainable for smaller businesses. The way data is labelled and tagged can either add or save a lot of time when commissioning a project. Normalisation alignment structures are underway, but proprietary systems still exist, especially in the indoor farming market. If data is not coming out of a system or device in a useable format, it will slow down industry progression. The more we can do now at this stage to create a uniform data standard in the indoor farming industry, the quicker it will develop.
In the indoor farming space, many variables are needed in one environment, e.g. cloud, on and off-premise control, lots of different systems and sensors to monitor lots of different parameters, e.g. temperature, Co2, irrigation, humidity, etc., therefore, lighting is one part of this big picture. As the industry develops more, it will force a policy of interoperability. At amBX, we can add value with integration software, passing and receiving data to the cloud, sideways to other systems and downwards towards specific devices. The feedback loop is very important to make sure insight is gained.
How can lighting add value from a fire safety perspective?
Safety is a critical element in buildings, and building platforms are increasingly including various parameters in their systems that cover the wellbeing, health and safety of occupants; some even display this data on screen throughout the building to empower the occupants and instil trust.
Emergency lighting is obviously a big part of fire safety strategies, there are standards and compliance building owners have to conform to, and if that isn’t maintained, fines and penalties can be incurred.
However, it is often still a manual process which is laborious and has room for human error. There are some good automated systems, but it is assumed implementation is a high cost; therefore, manual processes are still more common.
At amBX, we focus on emergency lighting as we can offer the maintenance and monitoring aspect alongside any existing hardware that’s already on the market; this can create an affordable solution. Our analysis reveals that automated emergency lighting systems are cost viable and pay back in under a year. Once people realise that time and money can be saved and safety, audit processing and control improved, we will start to see mass adoption.
In general, there are many standalone systems for standard lighting, emergency lighting and grow lighting, and in some instances, all three of these systems could be installed in a building. This means three systems to deploy, manage and maintain; however, the time and cost involved in this can be consolidated. We want to help people understand that all of these can work together, and everything can be passed into a single source.