Time to automate

Gavin Davids

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Energy efficiency is the buzzword that’s circling the construction industry at the moment. It’s all about ‘zero emissions’ and cutting down on consumption costs. There’s been notable progress on this front on behalf of the government and large segments of private industries.

Initiatives such as the introduction of district cooling plants and the building of solar photo-voltaic plants have helped to push energy efficiency to the forefront of the end-user’s consciousness.

So why then does the Middle East continue to struggle with high emissions and low energy saving rates?

For me personally, I think that the root cause of the issue can be traced back to the innate conservatism of the building industry.

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So, what seems like a good idea to you and me, is something that will require extensive testing and retesting in all environmental conditions before builders will even consider installing them in their projects.

While I can hardly blame them for their caution, and given the size of the projects they work on, I’d certainly hope they would be! However, I do worry that this caution will cause the Middle East to miss out on a golden opportunity to truly establish itself as a pioneer in the energy efficiency world.

Although automation technology has been around for a number of years now, it’s only recently that the MEP industry has realised just how useful it can be in cutting down energy costs.

According to the experts I’ve been speaking to, a just the introduction of simple controls and information technology into a building, without fundamentally alternating it, can bring about reductions of more than 20% in its energy footprint.

And that’s with using the existing HVAC systems, rather than ones that have been specifically designed to work with automated technology.

Imagine what the savings could be once you start going down the path of integrated design, dynamic windows and smarter HVAC?

As far as I can see, the Gulf has the unique opportunity to take advantage of this technology and begin forming the first private-public partnerships.

While the government obviously has a role to play, either through offering loan guarantees or by offering incentives, that doesn’t take away from the fact that corporations and other non-governmental, but not-for-profit agencies such as research centres, can take up leadership roles and adopt these technologies to show the wider market that they can and do work.

Even from a purely profit motive, if you have large IT companies setting up centres to act as ‘living labs’, you give the market a chance to get real world performance data that it can use to determine that automation is viable and that it has a business case.

There really is a strong role that I think the private industry can play here that will only be to its own significant advantage.

So I put it to the Siemens, the Johnson Controls and the IBM’s of the Middle East, if you’re serious about automation technology, then put your money where your mouth is.

Don’t tell us that automation technology works, show us how it can. The ball’s in your court boys, it’s up to you now to do something with it.

Gavin Davids is deputy editor of MEP.