Smart Cooling

HVAC systems frequently represent up to 51% of a building's energy consumption.

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Climate control has always been associated with effective but energy intensive HVAC systems. However, this has lead to complications for users due the associated costs that come with the energy intensive systems.

According to Michel Van Roozendaal, vice president of Control, Contracting and Services, Trane EMEIA, the usage of HVAC systems represents approximately 51% of a building’s total energy consumption.

Thus, optimising equipment is the first line of defence in protecting end-users from high energy costs. The best way to ensure that system components work and behave together is to introduce monitoring and control systems, which, by way of electronic communication, allow for quick, precise and open sharing of information.

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This data is then collated and shared over a network, allowing advanced intelligent controllers to take decisions, based on physics laws, to control the overall system to achieve the best performance.

“You could say that automated technology is like the conductor of an orchestra in that it helps raise the performance of the individual players and the group as a whole,” says Van Roozendaal, adding that the technology constantly reviews and adjusts a wide range of preset and programmed criteria to ensure that a client’s requirements are met with the lowest consumption of energy and water.

As ideal as these systems sound, the issue is that a number of Middle Eastern countries have not yet adopted them as viable sources of energy saving.

Jaideep Raje, a senior analyst at Lux Research, an independent research and advisory firm on emerging technologies, says that the GCC region is lagging behind the rest of the world when it comes to implementing integration, connectedness and intelligence in its building systems.

“Broadly speaking, if you look at trends like integration, connectedness and intelligence in a system, that’s certainly an area that the Middle East is lagging behind in right now.

[However,] there are certain areas where I think the Middle East has done a lot of thought leadership, which is an interesting duality,” he says.

One such example is the use of cooling systems that use solar thermal collectors to store thermal energy and lithium salts. Despite being an ‘elegant’ solution that is based on technology that’s very simple to understand, Raje says that it’s still regarded as extremely emerging and unproven across the rest of the world.

Despite this, Abu Dhabi and Masdar City were amongst the first to actually adopt the system and deploy it in the wider market.

“This was done a couple of years ago, and the rest of the world is only now catching up to it,” he adds.

In contrast, Raje explains that although the term ‘district cooling’ is currently the buzzword floating around developments, it remains difficult to actually get customers on board to use the more energy efficient systems.

“In the case of the Middle East, to a large extent, the amount of cooling that can be engineering by a district cooling mechanism is just not something that consumers are happy with,” Raje says.