October 22, 2015 - Building Automation
Question: What are the benefits of the IoT for building occupants today?
Answer: When the power goes out in critical buildings like hospitals, universities and military complexes, people’s lives are at risk. Even just a momentary shortage or loss of power for just a few seconds is the potential difference between life and death on the emergency room table. Blue Pillar connects all distributed generation assets into one centrally automated IoT energy management platform that helps keep the lights on and the energy costs down at some of the world’s most important facilities. Through this platform we are improving the resiliency of the facility and the overall electric grid itself. This is saving lives and improving overall quality of life.
Question: What advantages does IoT technology provide for facility professionals today?
Answer: A truly open IoT platform will help facilities professionals avoid having stranded assets, siloed data and redundant screens or dashboard. In a Facility IoT platform, all assets can be connected centrally regardless of vintage, age or vendor type,and true data mapping between the device and systems can occur. This gives the facility manager access locally or centrally, from one site or many sites, whether the data is behind the firewall or hosted in the cloud. The advantage is the facility manager can have the right data they need to run the facility more effectively, and not be a victim to vendor lock-in or legacy or proprietary systems.
Question: Are the benefits and advantages of IoT technology being realized today, and can you provide a specific example?
Answer: Mission-critical buildings do not have the luxury to lose power when the rest of the grid goes dark. The facility managers who operate these buildings need the confidence to know their emergency power supply systems (EPSS) will work in crisis and the lights will come on. However, many of the generators and assets that make-up an EPSS system could have been installed decades ago — long before even the advent of the Internet. Getting these assets “digitally” connected into a software-based, IoT platform is an imperative for organizations to know the real-time status of these assets, their health and their ability to work flawlessly when called on in an outage.
Source: Kimberly Getgen, VP, Marketing, Blue Pillar.
For more insights on the products, technology, benefits and challenges of the Building Internet of Things, visit www.FacilitiesNet.com/IoT
