IES' Intelligent Communities Lifecycle (ICL) Aims to Outpace Climate Change

Unfortunately, climate change is occurring at such a rapid rate that technology is racing to keep up with it. The built environment currently accounts for 40% of the world’s energy use, meaning buildings and cities have the potential to make the biggest impact in reducing carbon emissions globally.

Research shows that warming the planet more than 1.5C is a real threat to its livability, and the way things are going this 1.5C temperature safety guard could be exceeded in as little as 17 years.

Don McLean, IES founder and CEO, spoke with AECCafe Voice about IES’ new cutting-edge digital twin technology that connects distributed energy networks, renewables, master plans, building design, operation and retrofit.  Architects, engineers and developers, to city planners, ESCO’s, sustainability, energy and facilities Managers, all stand to benefit from the use of the Intelligent Communities Lifecycle platform from IES.

The ICL (Intelligent Communities Lifecycle) is a platform of interconnected decision support tools that facilitate the planning, design and operation of energy efficient and sustainable communities of any size and purpose, whether that be a company, campus, city or country. It is the most holistic tool for assessing any configuration of buildings throughout their lifecycle.

By launching the ICL, IES is making their technology available to anyone interested in energy efficiency and sustainability. Through pilot projects, the technology has already delivered an interactive 3D visualization and master planning model for Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, which uncovered campus-wide energy savings of 31% and $4.7m cost savings.

It has also been used to create a prototype community interaction model that enables real-time visualization of energy data within the Trent Basin community in Nottingham, UK. A model that includes information on renewable energy generation and storage, alongside energy consumption data, and general information about the homes.

While IES has focused their software efforts for many years on medium to large scale projects that are complex, now they are looking beyond a single building.

“We’ve developed a technology to address climate in recent years and now public has a chance to see it,” said McLean. “We are trying to address the climate change issue with how our technology can assess people. One of the big obstacles people have is they don’t have the quantity and quality of information with which to make good decisions. A lot of people resort to spreadsheets, simple calculations, etc. and the difficulty is that mistakes can be made. So, we see ourselves as an organization providing very good quality tools with access to information to make their building or community more sustainable by helping to reduce carbon emission and by decarbonization because they still need energy.”

There are four new modules for different aspects of the built environment. Their master planning software allows IES to do some analysis, and with the master plan they can apply software used for buildings.

The models can be generated very rapidly from a variety of different sources, said McLean. Generally, all that is needed is a rough idea is the conceptual stage.

“The purpose of that is to give us this feel, for example, you can look across time,” said McLean. “You can see may be what this will be like ten years from now. We’ll supply in this particular way, what are the changes and simulate what they might be like in ten years’ time, and if that’s the case we may need to make a different decision.”

This may become important where you have a university campus, which is a long term setting. They’re looking at making decisions over 20-30 years. Other scenarios may include generating some metrics around walkability.

An example given was that there was a fan running in a building, that was maintaining a constant pressure. The fan speed goes up in a particular area and the fan has to work much harder. “By running it through the ICL, we found there was a leak in the system, and the fan had to work much harder and the cost of that was about $1,000 a week,” said McLean. “They would never have found that out; it could’ve gone on for years. It may have only cost $50 to fix it but you need the data.”

Facilities management professionals are having problems with the maintenance of schools. Providing a portfolio information model for them would help identify what equipment they have, what data is recorded, so the information can be used in areas of interest.

“Each school could have their own community information model and we can assign information to them individually and they are grouped together in one model,” said McLean.

“We bring all live data in, showing six of the data sources, for example, and the problem they have with each one has a different login,” suggested McLean. “They have different interfaces and different types of information, and they have no connection between them. A classic example is, we can get the energy consumption of an EMR but we can’t connect that data to the BMAs that show the temperatures in the rooms and each HVAC system is working. We don’t know the impact or relationship of some of them and it makes it very difficult to make decisions. What we can do is bring all these different systems into a little robot that presents the software then we can put all data from different systems into one system so we can then get a visual and numerical relationship between that information and know that we can then have a much better idea of what’s going on. There is only one system that people have got to learn. It makes the whole process much easier. We can customize dashboards, that was the main metric they wanted for the school. You can delve into the level you need.”

With domestic hot water temperature, you can send out alerts and instead of having seven different alert systems or alarms, you have one set of alarms that the user can control and manage themselves. The ICL can then start identifying where sensors themselves may have a problem. Blue lines display what are acceptable and if the sensor shows outside that blue line, then it meant there was a problem and it would flag up that sensor problem. The sensor can go a long time without identifying a problem which can cause a lot of energy consumption. The problem can be solved before it happens if the ICL can get a profile of a building so that alarms can be set up for it in advance.

On the islands north of Scotland, there are some of the best wind profiles to generate wind energy, but they have too much energy, McLean said. “They want to send it back to the mainland, either they’ve got to dump it or else do something else with it. We help them make hydrogen and use it to power cars.”

ICL utilizes the latest digital technology to link IOT (Internet of Things) data, sensor readings, OpenData or any other data source into one interconnected platform, thus the ICL enables investigation of built environment performance at any level.

The technology will provide decision makers with the information required to form intelligent solutions, by identifying the most effective and resource efficient ways in which they can reduce the use of energy and fossil fuels within a community.

“Climate Change is a very real threat, and much more imminent than most people realize. Over the last 25 years we’ve built a solid reputation as a leading innovator in sustainable analytics for individual buildings and we’ve made a huge impact, eliminating the need for around 30 power stations to be built.

Tags: 2030 Districts, 3D, 3D cities, AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building design, building information modeling, climate change, Cloud, collaboration, construction, design, engineering, engineers, generative design, IES, infrastructure, laser scanning, Open BIM, point clouds, reality capture, visualization

Categories: 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11, 2D, 3D, AEC, AECCafe, apps, BIM, building information modeling, civil information modeling, Cloud, collaboration, construction, construction project management, convergence, engineering, field solutions, file sharing, geospatial, IES, infrastructure, integrated project delivery, Internet of Things, IoT, mobile, mobile printing, openBIM, plant design, point clouds, project management, reality capture, simulation, site planning, sustainable design, terrain, virtual reality, visualization

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