Energy Efficiency Archives - officetimes.com

The United States May Have a Major Power Shortage

Oct 30, 2024

I attended our Fall SIOR National Conference in Los Angeles, and one of the sessions discussed how and why our country will experience increased energy shortfalls. One speaker said that a Chatgpt search uses 17 times more energy than a Google search, and we are seeing huge demand increases for data centers across the Country….Read More→

Published in FUTUREiOT October 25, 2022, “New Sensing Tech To Make Smart Buildings Adaptive To The New Normal”

Oct 26, 2022

“ABI Research forecasts sensor shipments will grow from 18.5 million devices to surpass 300 million by 2030, a CAGR of 35%. “Traditionally, sensing in the commercial building sensing market has been tied to establish systems, such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC), fire and safety, and access control, but a range of additional environmental sensing technologies,…Read More→

Mandated Net-Zero GSA Office Building Leases Published in the Fall 2022 SIOR Report, was an article reported that GSA has established a goal to restrict new lease agreements to net-zero buildings by the year 2030. One big problem with this, according to John Robbins, CEO of Carpenter Robbins Commercial Real Estate in San Ramon (and a great friend of mine!) is there are very few net-zero buildings in North America. “As of May 2022 the New Buildings Institute had verified only 158 as net-zero and that total includes multifamily as well as commercial. Furthermore, few of the verified commercial buildings have enough vacant space to meet GSAs needs.” So it is possibly that regardless of the overall office vacancy rate there may be new focus on both new net-zero as well as retrofitting existing buildings where this makes economic sense. I also wonder if more environmentally-aware states begin similar mandates. Just imagine the future, driving your electric car to your net-zero office building…and there are more and more corporate giants getting on board with this as well.

Oct 11, 2022

Published in the Fall 2022 SIOR Report, was an article reported that GSA has established a goal to restrict new lease agreements to net-zero buildings by the year 2030. One big problem with this, according to John Robbins, CEO of Carpenter Robbins Commercial Real Estate in San Ramon (and a great friend of mine!) is…Read More→

Smart Buildings: Sensor costs low enough for reasonable payback

Oct 25, 2019

I recently attended a presentation on Cybersecurity and Smart Buildings, and I was blown away by the many potential benefits (and one major concern) in this emerging industry. The experts giving the presentation included executive David Colby from Schneider Electric SE (a $29B Fortune 500 multi-national manufacturer of HVAC and IoT hardware); a cybersecurity expert,…Read More→

LED’s

Jun 25, 2019

“LED’s are one of the fastest ways to reduce energy consumed by buildings…The study notes that adding networked lighting controls to LED installation boosts energy savings by an average of 47% beyond savings from LED’s alone.” Buildings June 2019

The IoT will become increasingly important in the operations of commercial buildings

Nov 1, 2018

The Internet of Things will become increasingly important in the operations of commercial buildings, keeping operating costs down, increasing building efficiencies, and improving employee satisfaction with their work environment. As one small example, if air conditioning repairs can be made before the unit breaks due to sensors and new technology, this can save money. If…Read More→

Smart office buildings increase bottom lines

Oct 22, 2018

In my opinion, over time there will be a greater rent spread between newer, smarter office buildings as compared with class B and C “dumber” buildings. There will be a number of reasons for this increasingly larger rent differential. Modern Class A office buildings with state of the art building systems can run much more…Read More→