THE term ‘smart cities’ goes back, variously, to a large-scale urban project launched by Los Angeles in the 1970s, and to initiatives by IBM and Cisco in the 1990s. Both companies wanted to get city authorities thinking about how information technology could bring city-wide economic benefits.
Today, the term has expanded to include the need to ‘green-up’ and decarbonise whole cities to mitigate global climate change. However, as Don McLean, the Founder and CEO of IES (Integrated Environmental Solutions) explains, so far, with one or two exceptions, attempts to implement city-wide carbon reduction initiatives have not had a huge amount of success.
In large part, he argues, this has been because these projects lacked sophisticated modelling systems with the power to analyse the hugely complex dynamics involved in understanding and modifying the built-environment in cities. Trying to tackle this level of complexity with spreadsheets, rather than a sophisticated modelling system is generally going to be an exercise in futility, he argues.
IES, he says, is already proving that it has the tools to help cities implement a coherent, planned, step-by-step approach to achieving zero carbon initiatives over a realistic time frame. The company’s ICL Digital Twin technology, allows IES to create a 3D virtual model of any built environment. The model can be as small as a cluster of buildings or campus and can scale up to an entire city. The model is then populated with data drawn from the manifold data sources within existing buildings and the networks they run on.
This data can be supplemented, as necessary, by information from a range of sensors for specific projects. McLean points out that IES can create the initial model in days. This will generally help the client to identify initial projects capable of delivering ‘quick wins’ with fast payback times. “Once the client sees for themselves that certain projects will demonstrably and reliably bring about significant reductions in a site’s carbon footprint, this generates the confidence for them to proceed with larger projects,” he notes. In this way, McLean explains, city authorities can gain a much more informed view of what is happening across their cities and to identify what can be done to improve things, both from a citizen’s perspective and in terms of the city’s environmental impact.
With the 3D virtual environment offering a realistic mirror image of areas of the actual city, changes to the model will give a very realistic view of what the impact would be of making the same changes in the actual city. Questions such as: how would putting a district heating system into this or that part of the city impact total energy usage across the city, can be given relatively accurate answers.
McLean points out that city authorities and city planners often do not realise that large buildings already generate huge amounts of data on a daily, or even an hourly basis.
This includes data from air conditioning systems, room sensors and from electrical and gas metres. Capturing this data and putting it into the model to give dynamic views of the interplay across multiple buildings can be a very powerful planning tool. The realistic digital twins of these buildings that can be set up in the 3D virtual environment provided by the IES software provide insights that simply cannot be gained from spreadsheets alone.
“The important message that we always look to get across to city authorities and to those responsible for large campuses or collections of buildings is that when you are trying to understand how to decarbonise these areas, it can seem incredibly overwhelming. And if you scale that up to the problem of how to get a whole city to move towards carbon neutrality, it is bewilderingly complex,” McLean says.
What IES does is to help those responsible to break the problem down into manageable chunks and to identify those projects that will provide the most immediate returns.“What we have seen in Europe, where the ‘Smart Cities’ concept really took off, and where very significant sums have been devoted to the problem, is that time after time the results have been very unsatisfactory. Europe funded a lot of cities to decarbonise them, and the returns so far have been very underwhelming.
“Breaking a city-wide problem down into appropriately sized chunks and then using the IES 3D virtual twin approach creates a much more manageable set of projects,” he explains. With the global pandemic, the same approach can help companies to better understand the dynamics of social distancing and safe working within their buildings and campuses. McLean points out that this can be done in the same models that are being used to manage carbon reduction projects in those buildings.
“The pandemic has made people realise that we need to take a more joined-up approach with COV-19 planning and decarbonisation. Our ‘virtual digital twin’ approach makes it much easier to test out different scenarios across an entire campus,” he comments.
IES has had considerable success in several projects, two of which, its planning projects with Limerick and its work with Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, are featured below. McLean points out that the company is also in talks with a number of large organisations who have multiple sites around the world. “Big companies are acutely aware of the need to decarbonise and to show their clients and the public that they have coherent strategies to move to either a zero carbon basis or even a carbon positive position. “From our perspective at IES we can provide them with, say, two or three man years of consulting support over the life of a long-term 15 year project.
“What is particularly attractive for clients though is that we can set up the digital twin of their campuses really quickly. This means that we can identify buildings that are not performing well right at the outset, and we can identify very significant ‘quick wins’ for them,” he says. This helps to build confidence in the strategy and prepares the ground for larger projects.
McLean points out that more often than not the decarbonisation projects being run by these large companies are completely independent of what the city itself is doing, and with neither side talking to the other. “One of the roles we can play is to help get cooperative dialogue going between the city authorities and the larger organisations, which itself can help to widen the scope of these projects,” he notes.
McLean points out that one of the benefits of the technology that IES offers is its powerful cloud-based communications, which fosters a ‘bottom-up’ approach by getting communities involved in decarbonisation efforts. “We saw an absolutely tremendous response to the COVID-19 crisis from the public, who endured lockdowns and responded well to the calls for social distancing and other safety precautions. “We need to get people as motivated and as engaged with decarbonisation projects to counter the threat of catastrophic climate change,” he concludes.
Limerick’s positive progress towards its net zero target.
LIMERICK is one of two Lighthouse Cities selected by the European Union for its Horizon 2020 +CityxChange project. The aim is to achieve a sustainable urban ecosystem with zero emissions and to establish a 100% renewable energy cityregion by 2050.
During the first phase of the project, IES successfully applied its innovative ICL digital twin technology and expertise to support the creation of a Positive Energy Block (PEB) within Limerick’s Georgian innovation district.
The IES team began their analysis with the creation of an intelligent model of the Georgian Innovation District. Using its digital twin technology they were able to create the model very quickly by importing data provided by Limerick City & County Council.
This enriched existing data drawn from Open Street Maps, together with other available socio-economic data. “Once we had this data incorporated into the model, we achieved the initial top-level understanding of CO2 production and energy consumption and distribution at a district level,” explains IES founder and CEO Don McLean.
Next, a block of five buildings were chosen to be the first PEB because they had better than average energy efficiency, with engaged and willing participants.
IES used a five-step process to perform more detailed analysis of the buildings identified for the PEB, the aim being to test, identify and group interventions that would aid the transition towards creating Net-Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB).
For each building, the process began with the creation of a Digital Twin using the IES Virtual Environment (IESVE). These virtual energy models replicate the actual buildings as closely as possible, incorporating real world data from the actual buildings. The next stage identified simple operational measures which the building owners could implement at little or no cost, but which could still result in significant savings.
The third stage involved the assessment of modest retrofit measures. The fourth and fifth stages looked at deeper renovation measures and at the integration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES), in this case, the placement of photovoltaic (PV) panels on two thirds of the collective roof space.
This energy source would be supplemented by a new innovative tidal turbine placed in the nearby river. IES was able to show that in total these measures would turn the five buildings into a Positive Energy Block. “Significantly, this five-step process is one which can be replicated by any other district, community or city to help create more positive energy blocks and accelerate progress towards net-zero targets,” McLean says.
The very model of a modern campus.
THE Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore asked IES to deliver a 3D master-planning and visualisation model, together with virtual testing and building performance optimisation, for a 250-hectare flagship Ecocampus.
The project was delivered in two phases. In the first phase, IES used its innovative ICL technology to provide high-level visualisation and analysis of testbed energy reduction technologies on site. Then it delved into the detailed simulation and modelling of 21 campus buildings. “NTU wanted to understand, at the campus level, which testbed solutions were performing the best, and to identify the optimum scale and location for their deployment,” explains IES Founder and CEO Don McLean.
The EcoCampus initiative covers the whole of the 200-hectare NTU campus and the adjoining 50 hectare JTC Corporation CleanTech Business Park. The initiative covers over 200 buildings, comprising 1.1 million square metres of built area. “The challenge for us was to scrutinise these testbed technologies in detail, and IES is helping us to achieve this,” commented Ms Priyanka Mehta, Project Manager at Nanyang Technological University.
IES and NTU worked together on the project with IES providing on-site and off-site support, together with its dynamic modelling technology. It also provided high-level training and consulting to NTU project members. For its part, NTU provided IES with valuable technology feedback and a large-scale, real-life implementation opportunity.
The initial phase concentrated on creating a master-planning model of the EcoCampus, complete with energy signatures for each building on the campus.
A corresponding online cloudbased Campus Information Model was also created to enable communication and engagement with campus staff and students. The master-planning model was then used as a baseline to simulate and analyse testbed technologies before moving into Phase 2, the ‘implementation’ phase of the project, which saw the best solutions from the Phase 1 ‘testbed’ project selected and applied.
Results demonstrated that the technologies could achieve 31% average energy savings, saving S$4.7million and 9.6kt of carbon. “The ability to assess energy saving options through innovative technologies across the campus was a great benefit,” commented Nilesh Y. Jadhav, Program Director, EcoCampus at NTU.
For more information please visit www.iesve.com
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