When building technology creates perfect places, that’s ingenuity for life

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks” is a saying I hear often in Australia. However, I recently had the opportunity to visit Melbourne’s World Heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Building, and it made me realize that old buildings have one up on their canine counterparts – even an 137-year-old building can learn new ‘tricks’ and become more sustainable and energy efficient.

My recent visit to the Royal Exhibition Building together with our global Siemens Building Technologies CEO Matthias Rebellius was part of an event to mark Siemens’ partnership with Museums Victoria, Australia’s largest public museums organisation. Over the last 12 months, Siemens has been working behind the scenes to implement energy efficiency measures across Museums Victoria’s six sites, thanks to the Victorian State Government’s Greener Government Building program.

Backed by a detailed facility study, the partnership encompasses:

• lighting and water efficiency upgrades across all six sites (Melbourne Museum, Royal Exhibition Building, Scienceworks, the Immigration Museum, and two storage facilities);
• the installation of a new Siemens Desigo CC Building Management System at the Melbourne Museum;
• Siemens Demand Flow chilled water system optimization at the Melbourne Museum;
• Siemens Co-generation system for the Melbourne Museum (scoped as part of phase 2);
• chiller replacement at the Immigration Museum;
• HVAC control optimization strategies including Siemens variable-frequency drives (VFDs);
• the implementation of Navigator, the cloud-based energy and sustainability platform to monitor all buildings.

These measures will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent and water usage by six percent. These are impressive statistics in their own right, however as the Lily D’Ambrosio, Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, said on the day,

"these partnerships don’t just save energy and protect the environment, they also of course, save money.”

The measures put in place will reduce utility costs by 32 percent, meaning that the project will pay for itself in seven years. In easy to understand terms, this reduction would be enough to power 1264 homes. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would be the same as planting 835,891 trees or taking 6,000 cars off the road each year, while the reduction in water usage would equate to filling 102 backyard swimming pools every year.

It is encouraging to see the Victorian State government’s commitment to make government-owned buildings more efficient. Up to 40 per cent of the energy used worldwide is consumed for and in buildings (more than what is consumed by mobility and industry), and many building owners are not aware of the amount of unnecessary energy their buildings use.

In the broader debate around Australia’s energy security that has been playing out in politics recently, I feel that energy efficiency is one area where we could make significant improvements. After all, the cleanest energy is that which is not needed.

The drive towards more energy-efficient buildings is assisted by digitalization, which is offering new opportunities to utilise the immense amounts of data generated as buildings now start to ‘talk’ to each other through advanced building management systems. At Museums Victoria for example, Siemens’ cloud-based energy and sustainability platform, Navigator, provides powerful analytical and reporting capabilities by collecting and analyzing large volumes of building performance data across all sites – this in turn maximizes efficiency.

This is particularly important when you take into account the role that Museums Victoria plays in preserving Australia’s cultural heritage and history. Not only do they care for a diverse collection of 17 million objects and specimens that include rare books, documents, and fossils that are millions of years old, they also carry out ground-breaking scientific and humanities research. Each site has specific requirements for temperature, lighting and humidity control to make sure it remains a ‘perfect place’ for their collection, but also the 2.5 million visitors who cross their doors every year.

This partnership will show other organisations what is possible.  As Switzerland-based CEO of Siemens Building Technologies, Matthias Rebellius, said on his visit, this partnership is

“a benchmark not just in the state, but also in Australia and across the Southern Hemisphere. When building technology creates perfect places, that’s ingenuity for life.”