Adoption of Green Technologies in the Buildings/Facilities Sector: A Market Perspective

Scott Boutwell
Independent management consultant

Introduction

The building and facility industry is undergoing radical change today, as owners are demanding more project visibility, improved risk management (scheduling and costs), and increased use of technologies that will allow for less waste, more efficient energy consumption, and ultimately lower costs over the lifecycle of the facility—from design and construction to operations. From a technology and collaboration/workflow standpoint, BIM (Building Information Modeling) is a significant market driver affecting many of those changes.

On a parallel path, cleantech, green technologies, and sustainability represent a wide array of technologies and methodologies that are emerging at different rates and for various problem sets across multiple industries. The buildings industry has adopted some of these technologies such as energy efficiency analysis and GHG emission inventory, but on a limited scale to date.

It is important for green technology companies to understand the BIM adoption trend and incorporate it into their market strategies. Its application—both the technology and changes in increased collaboration—allows for significant exchange of data and information by all stakeholders involved over the lifecycle of the facility—between owners, architects, engineers, contractors, and operators. The drivers associated with green technology adoption include efficiencies in energy use, increased emphasis on environmental health, and the motivation to generate less waste. The acceptance and active use of a “model” provides all stakeholders with a common framework to work collaboratively on performance issues throughout the design lifecycle.

Emerging Trends in the Buildings and Facilities Sector

BIM is not the only market driver in the industry today; there are a wide range of factors affecting growth:

• Consolidation of the Buildings industry (mergers and acquisitions)
  
  
• Standardization of design and associated processes
  
  
• Worker health, productivity, and comfort
  
  
• Complexity and cost reduction in technology use (requirements for training, data exchange, modeling)
  
  
• Green House Gas (GHG) inventory and management
  
  
• Green Buildings and more rigorous certifications
  
  
• Zero Energy Buildings (ZEB)
  
  
• The advent of Energy Services Companies (ESCOs)
  
  
• Security and access
  
  
• New carbon regulations

Many of these issues center on sustainability (for example, worker health, GHG control, carbon regulation, green and zero emission buildings), and require IT–based enabling technology, which aligns with BIM.

Trends and Challenges

Given the stage of maturation of both BIM and green technology adoption, there are a number of technology, business model, and organizational design issues that may affect the rate of growth and adoption.

Process and Workflow Changes

BIM is not just the adoption of new technology, but it also incorporates new collaborative workflows. There is more emphasis on collaborative design and planning in the beginning phases of a project, so that costs and risks in later stages like construction and operations (where most of the costs are incurred) may be managed and contained. Green tech vendors can be involved in these early planning stages, so that a realistic assessment of cost savings and improved environmental performance are identified. Also, they can add value to the optimization process (conducting “what if” scenarios), which may lead to additional savings and benefits that may not have been readily apparent. Building modeling allows for earlier decision making in the design-build process, allowing earlier consensus building as well as a framework for trade-off discussions.

The new modes of collaboration among what were disparate and separate workgroups, along with sophisticated visualization, allow for continuous knowledge transfer, accelerated adoption of best practices, but perhaps most importantly, creating opportunities for “virtual work groups” to identify and evaluate innovative approaches for sustainability.

Model Development and Skills Required

BIM is relatively new, with a select number of platforms such as Autodesk and Bentley emerging as thought and market leaders. Green technologies are emerging as point solutions to be leveraged in these platforms, with a multitude of applications in GHG calculation/inventory, and energy modeling and analytics.

Viewing the number of energy applications currently available, and assuming that other sustainability applications such as GHG emissions and control, health and safety, and social welfare (perhaps access control and security?) will soon be available, the questions will not be whether we have available tools, but rather: what are the most applicable tool(s) to use; what are the key parameters and data sets required for both calibration and validation; and perhaps most importantly, what expertise (including experience on similar projects) is critical for the aforementioned tasks?

It is clear that there is no one toolset or platform to allow owners or consultants to conduct building simulations, and there is still a very strong need for training in simulation methodologies, not just with the technology itself.

Technology Framework

I compare this evolution of CAD moving to BIM technology to the evolution in the business intelligence (BI) technology space and associated markets. BI was originated with the premise of understanding the historical records in companies, answering questions such as: “How did we do in sales in this region last quarter?” As the technology evolved, user adoption accelerated, and the data stores became more complete and rich, allowing for questions on current performance such as: “How are sales looking currently in this region?” Many industries such as retail and financial services have adopted these applications of BI. But the direction of this technology and value to businesses is in the prediction of future scenarios, as well as in the optimization of performance standards or metrics. Similarly, BIM is allowing owners/operators and AEC professionals to move from historical views and relatively static perspectives to real-time scenario planning and optimization modes.

Along these lines, cleantech applications will not require all of the spatial and structured data that BIM models contain; rather, there is a need for select data sets to be available. This challenge could be met with a data warehousing schema, creating a separate data model that contains parameters and data specific for cleantech applications, akin to the BI industry. Moving forward, integration of applications may not be as favorable as allowing for more interoperability. Both owners/operators and AEC firms may still require sufficient flexibility in designing unique and site-specific AECO solutions that leverage the appropriate sustainability tools, especially if one anticipates that there will be many more sustainability applications and technology advances forthcoming in the near future.

Portfolio Management

For owners of multiple facilities or enterprise level owners, BIM allows for the re-use and purposing of models to standardize design and construction, thus driving down material use and costs as well as the need for multiple technology applications across a portfolio. It may also allow for a more global or regional view of a group of facilities across an enterprise or under the purview of a governmental agency. This “digital city” approach may leverage BIM to achieve benefits on a much larger scale. If one considers the potential environmental and social impacts of a portfolio of buildings across an enterprise or governed on a regional/global scale, the inclusion of sustainability metrics and tools allows for potentially much higher positive impacts.

Partnership Strategies

“Go to Market” strategies for green technology solution providers should also reflect the goal of leveraging established companies in the AEC space for sales, branding, and deployment channels. A key component to this strategy is to identify a technology partner who may bring brand awareness, marketing, and channels access. This is particularly true when one considers the range of expertise and technologies (cleantech, engineering, hardware, equipment, etc.) required to design, build, and operate infrastructure.

It should also be noted that the “exit strategy” for successful green tech start ups could be acquisition by a larger established software provider in the space. Green Building Studio was recently acquired by Autodesk, and Bentley Systems acquired a number of smaller software firms last year that it had partnered with, including Hevacomp (which provides MEP -Mechanical, Electrical & Plumbing). Both Autodesk and Bentley are advocates of BIM adoption, and one would assume that these new acquisitions will allow them to integrate green technologies into BIM software platforms.

Need for Benchmarks and Standards

Building performance standards have not been defined in contractual terms (yet). As “high performance” and “zero emission” building segments grow, and there are more case studies for the AEC industry to begin some level of standardization and benchmarking, we will see more standards or performance goals being applied.

There is another market driver to accelerate benchmarks for achieving sustainability goals, such as energy efficiency—as ESCOs (energy services companies) become mature, the success of their business models and resultant fees will be predicated on achieving significant energy and resource reductions in buildings that they design, construct, and operate.

BIM does change the liability landscape, given the increased level of collaboration in the AECO workflow. A key part of early involvement is the simulation of energy and resource savings, so sustainability technology partners may need to qualify (and hedge) their predictions until such time that the industry has a much larger number of case studies to benchmark against.

Beyond “Green” to “Sustainable”

Increasing energy efficiency via modeling and analysis has been the primary “cleantech” or “green” application leveraged by BIM to date. The reason is threefold: development of applications by the federal government (DOE Energy Efficiency Research) and in the private sector; the GSA’s energy use mandates for federal buildings; and the fact that energy efficiency may be the “lowest hanging fruit” and most easily attainable green goal at this point in time.

There is ample opportunity to move beyond energy efficiency into GHG inventory and control, carbon management, and other sustainability applications. For example, evaluating the impact of buildings on WAGES (Water, Air, Gas, Electric, Steam) figures indicate that buildings—including the electric power required—account for 45% of water use in the US alone. Not including electrical power, domestic use is 100 gpd per capita, and total water use considering the impact of electrical power generation is 140 Billion gallons a day. While most of the AECO industry is currently focusing on driving down energy use and costs in buildings as a first step in achieving sustainability, it is clear that the “delta” for improving water resource conservation is very high, and should also provide a strong market driver for adoption of technologies to maximize conservation and efficiency of water use in buildings.

Other sustainability goals that involve new processes and enabling technologies include sustainability reporting, such as that for NGOs like GRI (Global Reporting Institute), social benefits such as worker comfort issues and increasing stakeholder visibility and input), green supply chain and procurement, and occupant health and safety. While it may seem that these applications would not leverage the functionality of BIM as deeply as energy modeling for instance, most if not all of these goals would be served by technologies that leverage data sets facilitated by BIM. But more importantly, the adoption of BIM—both the technology and its collaborative workflow—provides the framework to achieve these sustainability goals by establishing a dynamic representation of the facility along with its equipment and its occupants.

About the Author

Scott Boutwell is a management consultant and former AEC executive from Oracle and URS Corporation. He provides tech commercialization, M&A advisory, and “go to market” strategy services to cleantech, sustainability, and global AEC firms. His blog covers anecdotes and growth strategies in the engineering design and sustainability sectors. Scott can be reached at scott@c-level.biz.

Note: The views expressed in Viewpoint articles are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of AECbytes.

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