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You may be familiar with BAS (or BMS) systems. They’re essentially customized controls that allow an operator to control an entire building remotely, get feedback, and maximize equipment efficiency (reducing GHG emissions). That technology is great but it is 40 year old technology. Even the newer models rely on fairly stagnant functionality. Simply put, it’s reached its peak. Digital Twins is essentially creating a complete digital version of your building and mechanical systems. This control will then run thousands of calculations to determine what is the best way of operating to maximize efficiency. It will always operate the building at peak performance, regardless of how things may change throughout the building’s life. Classic BMS systems cannot do this without human intervention. This technology is the future of buildings, and will bring building controls and efficiency into the 21st century. An even more exciting part of Digital Twins is that it will eventually lead to city based efficiency operation as a whole (think hive-mind mentality).
Today, as it currently stands, even the most advanced chiller plant controls are run with semi-custom, “out of the box” solutions. They are designed to maintain setpoints by staging equipment using PID logic. This generally works great on day one. But later down the line when equipment wears down or is out of service, your system, as a whole, no longer works at the most optimal level. Alogorithm-based plant optimization utilizes the known best operating points and efficiency curves of the equipment being used, along with a variety of sensors to fine-tune the plant operation to always work at the most efficient level. In addition to optimized controls, utilizing new pumps with the latest “smarts and parts” can provide more insight to your control to push the savings even greater.
Currently most buildings are starting to transition to heat pump technology for both heating and cooling, as it is by far the most efficient way of operating. Heat pumps can use 1 unit of energy input to create 2 units or more of energy output. It sounds far-fetched to those who do not understand, but that’s why they are so great. One of the biggest laggards though, in this transition to heat pump technology has been domestic hot water generation. This has continued to be done with traditional fossil fuels because heat pumps have not been able to get hot enough in our cold climate. That is now beginning to change. The latest technology of heat pumps uses CO2 as the refrigerant, which can drastically improve efficiency and generate much higher output temperatures! What’s more – CO2 is a much safer refrigerant than the chemical ones historically used, which have had drastically negative effects on our environment. |