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Facilities Management
Converge & Conquer
7/1/2008
When IT and Facilities team up for 'intelligent' building management, efficiency, savings, and user benefits soar.
When Tony Ragucci, associate director
of maintenance services, sat down with other Harvard University (MA)
officials in 2002 to revamp the institution's Blackstone office complex,
the group decided to make it a centerpiece of the university's energy conservation
initiative. The facility, which comprises three buildings with
40,000 square feet of office space, houses the university's operations
departments, including its facilities maintenance operations. Today, as a
result of the initiative, ground-source heat pumps cool Blackstone, water
from an adjacent steam plant provides heat to the edifices, and valence
units cool and heat the spaces via convection. A demand-based ventilation
system, an energy-efficient roof, occupancy and daylight sensors,
plus a "green" elevator (60 percent more efficient than a conventional
hydraulic elevator, thanks to a variable-frequency microprocessor) all
have helped to reduce summer energy use to 42 percent below standard
requirements. Because of this unique blend of energy-efficient devices
and nascent IT technology, Blackstone has been awarded a Platinum rating,
the highest energy efficiency rating possible, by the US Green Building
Council under its Leadership in Energy and
Environmental Design (LEED) rating system.
Since the completion of the Blackstone energy conservation project, and using their experiences with that effort to guide them, Ragucci and his team have been responsible for revamping the energy profiles of more than 300 other buildings across the campus.
US Campuses Get on Board
The fact of the matter is, state-of-theart, energy-efficient facilities are now emerging on campuses across the US, and for a variety of reasons: One practical consideration is that such buildings bring down energy costs, which are now soaring. Facing rising expenditures and a tightening of potential revenue, universities are looking for ways to reduce operating costs, and more efficient buildings offer them one way to meet that goal. Yet, helping to conserve natural resources and improve the environment also has become a common theme in academic circles. Consequently, some members of this community feel an obligation to lead the charge with novel energy initiatives. Computer technology has become less expensive and more powerful, so its inclusion in the facilities management of these buildings can be more easily cost-justified than in the past; what's more, its impact can be significant.
As a result, campus structures no longer need to be "dumb" compositions of brick and mortar. Just as burgeoning technological capabilities and lower techproduct pricing made it possible for academic institutions to offer services such as online learning, low-priced microprocessors and software advancements have enabled campus facilities departments to add intelligence to the management of their structures. Colleges and universities now are using networked intelligent controls to turn lights off and on, deliver electrical power to classrooms, control the flow of air in and out of buildings, provide heat and cooling to facilities, and monitor CO2 emissions throughout. What's more, schools now are able to collect historical data about their facilities' performance, and then make system adjustments accordingly to increase management efficiency and reduce costs. Not surprisingly, these new capabilities are blurring the lines between traditional facilities management functions and those of the IT department.
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