Smart Building Solutions

Accenture Smart Building Solutions represent the convergence of building-controls technology and information management—a chance to reduce total heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) costs by 25 percent or more.

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Buildings consume approximately 40 percent of the world’s energy— far more than the transportation sector.¹  And regardless of age, nearly every building—office complexes, hotels, hospitals, manufacturing plants, retail stores—wastes energy. Complicating matters further, buildings, tenants and building equipment represent a complex, interdependent system. Every structure runs differently, even when constructed or run by the same organization. Plus, energy consumption profiles and concerns differ not only across locations and structures, but with seasons and occupancy levels. Advanced energy-saving solutions must therefore cater to time as well as place.
 
Accenture Smart Building Solutions are designed with this complexity in mind. They work together to form a comprehensive suite of energy-management services to help companies reduce energy consumption, emissions and costs by capturing all energy-relevant information from a building’s systems, providing an analysis of that information and clearly articulating savings opportunities. Captured data is then used to adjust building systems to increase energy efficiency.

Learn more about Accenture Sustainability Services

¹The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD).

Accenture believes that reducing energy consumption is a data-management challenge more than a hardware issue. Companies must know everything they can about how they are consuming energy before they can decide what to do about conserving it.

Accenture Smart Building Solutions complement, rather than replace, existing building management systems and enterprise environmental management systems by adding a variety of benefits and capabilities:

• Advanced measurement and verification to measure the impact of energy-efficiency initiatives.

• 24/7 centralized remote monitoring to maintain optimal building operation across a company’s real estate portfolio.

• Predictive analytics to help ensure proactive maintenance and optimization of equipment operation levels.

• Supervisory control capabilities to help building operators automatically rectify issues via keystrokes, based on pre-defined business rules.

• Energy modeling capabilities to help companies plan and manage energy demand via an automated demand response program.

Accenture is a leader in developing sustainability solutions that deliver business benefits and enable high performance.

Accenture Smart Building Solutions work together or independently and provide the following:

• Enterprise Energy Management: Interactive, Web-based tools track, analyze and report metered data through “dashboard” snapshots of portfolio energy performance and trends. These are prioritized by building type and key performance indicators (e.g., kBtu per square foot per year). Potential benefit: up to 3 percent reduction in HVAC energy consumption.

• Operational Guidelines: Accenture helps clients maximize visibility into their building’s compliance with standard operating procedures (setpoints, schedules, etc.). We use interactive Web-based reporting that enables filtering, sorting and Excel-based downloading of results. Building managers gain the ability to enforce operational guidelines across hundreds of buildings. Potential benefit: 4 percent to 8 percent reduction in HVAC energy consumption.

• Automatic Fault Detection Diagnosis and Impact: Automatic fault detection capabilities enabled by Accenture Smart Building Solutions provide a prioritized and actionable view into dozens of building equipment faults across a company’s real estate portfolio. With this service, companies gain the opportunity to reduce the frequency and impact of faults such as unbalanced airflows, broken dampers, control component failures or degradation, air-cooled condenser fouling, and valve leakage. Potential benefit: 10 percent to 15 percent savings in HVAC energy consumption.

• Supervisory Control: Supervisory control is about correlating and integrating information from all building equipment to ensure that comfort, temperature, humidity and ventilation requirements are met in the most energy-efficient way. Previously gathered fault information is utilized to ensure that run times of inefficient equipment are minimized. Potential benefit: 8 percent to 12 percent reduction in HVAC energy consumption. Additional savings of 2 percent to 5 percent are achievable by automating setpoint temperature changes.