By Anne Morris
In-building IoT playing growing role in climate change battle
The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated uptake of smart devices in buildings to better monitor energy consumption and occupancy, and the need to understand what is and what is not being used is crucial to meeting sustainability goals.
According to Mary Clark, CMO of smart building company Brivo, corporations are increasingly deploying sensors, video and other data-gathering devices within buildings to help them manage and meet their sustainability and climate objectives.
The challenge, though, is that as companies adopt hybrid working models, not all of these buildings are corporate facilities. As Clark points out, the need to gather data across commercial real estate, multi-family properties and multi-building enterprise facilities “is now a requirement for anyone owning or managing a structure as this data is necessary to monitor and manage energy consumption. IoT-related systems will continue to proliferate to feed that need for data”.
The problem has been that buildings by their very nature are “hard-wired” and building owner-operators have been among the last to prioritise the move to digital, Clark said.
These owner-operators should now be deploying comprehensive systems and sensors, “and then use the data gathered to make changes in the way they manage the consumption of energy for those buildings”, she added.
“Fundamentally, building access and sensors are becoming a part of IT security management, which will help accelerate the use of software and data to monitor, assess and change consumption to hopefully positively impact climate change,” Clark concluded.