BSEE
BSEE asked Nigel Thomas, ABB’s Naonal Specificaon and Projects Sales Manager, some quesons about the electrical distribuon system inside the new 17storey Fusion Swansea purposebuilt student
accommodaon (PBSA) block.
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What did the developer and building operator want from their electrical system?
Developer RDE Silex and operator Fusion Students wanted the building to stand the test of time with infrastructure to provide a homely and welcoming atmosphere for students. They also needed to meet the government’s tightening environmental standards and keep energy bills and maintenance costs down.
The system is designed to provide students with individual control over the heating and lighting in their own rooms. This is an area where student accommodation differs from other offices and commercial buildings, where individual occupiers do not usually expect a high degree of control. Operational costs such as energy and maintenance typically represent 80 percent of a building’s lifetime cost, so by deploying a smart building system, Fusion Swansea saw an opportunity for better control over its energy bills and carbon emissions.
In practice, this meant deploying a system that would meet BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) certification, as well as having a cloud-based system to support remote monitoring and enabling the managers to optimise the building. This approach means that Fusion’s building managers will be able to monitor the building services remotely on a 24/7 basis. They’ll be able to log in from any device to access data, for example to see the status of equipment and review historic operating data. They can also check alerts, such as when energy consumption goes above a pre- defined level. This will support condition-based monitoring and avoid unplanned outages. Furthermore, being able to access, review and compare data will provide the insight to give building managers more confidence in their decisions.
ABB supplied equipment to comply with Part L of the Building Regulations and meet the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) TM 39 guidance for energy metering and submetering in non-domestic buildings.
What electrical distribution technologies have been deployed at Fusion Swansea?
LEFT: The Story Den RIGHT: The Bistro
The hardware covers all the equipment needed to control, monitor and manage electricity from the incoming utility supply to individual circuits. It includes circuit monitoring systems and Internet of Things (IoT) gateways and energy meters. We also supplied our range of smart power circuit breakers, including Emax 2 air circuit breakers (ACBs) and Tmax XT moulded case circuit breakers (MCCBs) within the main low voltage switchgear panel, as well as TruOne automatic transfer switches (ATSs).
he £50 million development will be one of Swansea’s tallest buildings and will open in September 2021, with 780 bedrooms, shared social and leisure facilities, as well as retail units on the ground floor.
ENERGY MANAGEMENT Fusion power: saving energy for student accommodation
These devices have built-in communication modules, provide energy metering, power quality and analytics to support monitoring of all the building’s main power circuits.
These devices can also be connected directly to the cloud-based Ability Energy and Asset Manager platform. This draws data from the hardware devices with a high data sampling rate.
How did you overcome the
sitespecific challenges? During the project, we provided technical guidance on how to deploy the metering system and advice to meet the site-specific requirements. One particular challenge was the limited space available in the riser cupboards as Fusion wanted to minimise the space required for building services. The riser cupboards house the main panels that feed each floor of the accommodation. The traditional approach would be to use energy meters. However, they require their own metering cubicle and space was not available. Instead, we supplied energy sensors for installation inside the distribution panels themselves. These are compact and communicate directly with the digital platform.
Does the technology have
benefits for contractors? An additional benefit was time saved during the project’s installation phase. Our latest hardware has digital measurement and communication technology built in and this enabled most of the pre-commissioning to be undertaken offsite. It also saved time for the electrical consultant as it reduced the need for designing and engineering the system.
How can new technology help to
futureproof buildings? Overall, the project is a great example of how the latest technology can help developers create comfortable and sustainable accommodation for students while controlling costs and supporting energy efficiency legislation.
However, the true test is how well it will adapt to the future. New requirements are coming in all the time to protect safety and improve energy efficiency.
For example, a new Part 8 will be added to the 18th Edition of the IET Wiring Regulations. It will cover energy efficiency and will probably follow a similar approach to the international IEC 60364-8 standard. It will also be designed to work hand-in- hand with Part L of the Building Regulations. The goal is to optimise the overall efficient use of electricity and it’s something that we’re seeing demand for at the highest level. The owners of large commercial and public estates are pushing towards low-energy building design. For example, the NHS has announced a plan to achieve net zero status by 2040. The UK is planning for all new buildings to be net zero by 2030 and for all commercial buildings to be net zero by 2050. The latest digital technology will be vitally important to achieving this as it will use accurate data to optimise the consumption and control of electrical systems.
Another aspect of future-proofing is scalability. It is essential that a system has the capacity to scale up, for example to meet tighter regulations, to add new circuits or to provide even greater levels of monitoring by integrating new sensors. Alternatively, a building owner may want to add control over multiple generation sources, such as wind, solar, battery energy storage, combined heat and power and district heating. With control over consumption and generation, this type of smart building system can also help building owners if they want to start participating in energy markets.
We have deployed the technology at our own sites. One example is a factory in Lüdenscheid, Germany, which has a cloud-based energy manager and solar panels on canopies over the car park. The system has reduced our carbon emissions by 630 tonnes per year. We have also cut energy costs by 4.2 percent thanks to better forecasting and utilisation of our assets. And we are also selling excess energy to the grid at peak times, earning up to 5 percent of operating costs.
How will smart building
technology develop in the future? The big trend is towards the digital twin concept under Building Information Modelling (BIM). A digital twin is the virtual version of a building or another asset that exists in parallel.
Building managers will use the twin as a real-time digital model to optimise energy consumption and maintenance. They can also compare theoretical and actual performance for an individual building or across their entire estate.
Digital twins will also help consultants. They will run ‘what if’ scenarios on digital twins and compare different configurations in the virtual environment. The big advantage of digital technology is that it provides the data to measure – and if you can measure, you can manage, learn and improve the efficiency of your buildings.
30 BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER APRIL 2021 Read the latest at:
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