Energy management in the cloud for tenants

Lend Lease Apartments’ luxury Convesso Concavo development in Victoria Harbour, Docklands, Melbourne, had to meet a number of design criteria to achieve an industry rating of ‘4 Star Green Star’ for Multi-Unit Residential buildings, as defined and audited by the Green Building Council of Australia. Included within the assessment criteria is a need to monitor energy and water use in real time. From the onset, achieving this capability for over 450 apartments was an innovative and technical challenge.

Lend Lease with Fujitsu and Switch Automation were able to integrate new networking, automation and monitoring technologies together to enable a solution that residents could easily use to manage and monitor their own energy usage. The solution was designed to comply with the energy monitoring aspects of the Green Star rating design criteria.

A key project priority was to monitor environmental controls and provide real-time energy usage metrics. Another challenge was to develop a means of using a single high-speed IP fibre cabling network to replace traditional multiple, non-IP copper cabling infrastructures. By adopting a cloud-based energy management solution, the design team at Lend Lease now has the potential to collate this data and make ongoing design refinements.

The Switch Automation platform continuously monitors energy and hot and cold water usage and then provides a simple-to-use, in-home display to provide real-time and historical usage and trend data. This provides residents with greater visibility of energy and resource consumption. Within the building, video intercom, security systems and data collection devices also share the same IP network, which improves the flexibility and reliability while reducing the cost of the initial set-up. Because the energy monitoring system uses a cloud-based infrastructure, additional modular functionality can also be added at a later date. This guarantees a system that is ready to meet the needs of evolving technological change. Additionally, Lend Lease is able to track energy and water data use to aid research in how to improve future apartment designs and deliver more efficient performance from buildings.

Lend Lease’s decision to build Convesso Concavo’s communication and control solution around an industry-standard internet protocol (IP)-based network has helped to standardise the method and improve the efficiency of interfacing and integrating systems. Combined with using the Fujitsu Cloud as a systems hosting medium, any limitations on the need for localised or time zone restricted access to the system have been removed. Extra features and functions can also be added at a later date with minimal effort.

This solution has received a state award in the iAwards for Sustainability and Green IT.