Smart buildings are touted as providing more efficient buildings in terms of resource utilization, renewable resources, and energy efficiency, and as delivering improved indoor air quality (IAQ), productivity, and connectivity with the digital world. They hold out the promise of seamlessly weaving people, technology, and business into an enhanced and optimized ecosystem. Facilities managers must understand the real-world practicalities of implementing smart building technologies and systems.
One of today’s highly promising innovations in energy operations is grid-interactive efficient buildings. Referred to as GEBs, these structures are connected to the grid and draw on distributed energy sources. Among other benefits, GEBs offer hold the potential to lower property operations costs. But are utilities keeping up? A new study from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy tackles that question.
Facebook’s new solar project will see its Newton County data center hub powered by 100% renewable energy. Walton Electric Membership Corporation (EMC) has signed a contract with Silicon Ranch on behalf of Facebook for a new solar project as part of its agreement to supply the renewable energy that will be used to power Facebook’s data center in Newton County, Georgia.
The green data center market is forecast to grow from $43.24 billion USD in 2018 to $147.88 billion in 2024. Sustainability has become as central to data centers as, well, data. Uptime may be king, but the energy cost of that uptime is a factor the crown cannot afford to ignore.
There is great interest in the launch of 5G networks across many industries, including wind power. One of the reasons for the focus on 5G technology is that it will be used to connect thousands of industrial IoT (IIoT) sensors and devices. These sensors have special communication characteristics that 5G has been specifically designed to handle. What many don’t know, however, is that many “5G” applications can actually be handled by today’s 4G/LTE networks. This opens up some intriguing applications of IIoT sensors and analytics in the wind power industry not only in the future, but already, today.
The topic of “sustainability” is increasingly coming to the fore through “Green IT”. Resource-conserving components with low energy consumption and environmentally friendly materials are currently the No. 1 trend topic. Rosenberger OSI’s FTT-ACP concept provides an innovative, redundant Ethernet cabling solution that can be used flexibly, reduces energy costs savings by up to 50%, requires only 31.25% of the energy required to manufacture cables for traditional savings, and offers raw materials savings of up to 70%.
