Intelligent Buildings: India's Solution to its Energy Woes

BANGALORE: India is expected to become the world's third largest construction market by 2025, reaching $ 1 trillion and adding 11.5 million homes a year, according to a recent study by Global Construction Perspectives and Oxford Economics.

While India continues on its construction trajectory, it still grapples with energy woes. Power shortages and outages are common in large parts of the country on a daily basis. Last year, India faced its largest power outage affecting over 600 million people and businesses.

Reports suggest that buildings are responsible for more than 40 percent of the world’s total primary energy consumption and around half of the energy and water used in buildings is wasted. According to McKinsey & Company, unlocking energy efficiency in new building construction, as well as improving appliance and industrial plants’ efficiency, could deliver $42 billion in annual savings to India by 2020.

As the demand for buildings and energy seems unwavering in India, the advances in technology are enabling greater efficiency making intelligent buildings the need of the hour.

What are intelligent buildings?

Intelligent buildings are an integration of building, technology and energy systems that create a single hub to receive actionable information, thereby allowing building owners or occupants to manage the building’s use of energy and space, as well as its environmental impact.

As office design moves towards fewer and smaller individual work spaces with a larger proportion dedicated to interactive uses, connections in non-traditional locations are increasing, driven by growth in Wi-Fi, DAS, networked LED lighting, sensor networks and PoE technologies. Thus, increase in occupant density has led to a need for better energy and space management and analytics, making convergence and integration of building systems imperative.

Intelligent buildings are highly networked, sensitive and adaptable leading to lower construction costs, optimized operational expenditures and greater energy efficiency. Industry sources predict that intelligent building technology can save up to 30 percent of water usage, 40 percent of energy usage and even help to reduce the building maintenance costs by 10 to 30 percent.