Pro Member Gathering Annual Recap + FREE Nexus Pro Sneak Peek

Hey friends,

Two weeks ago, we shared a review of the last year of Nexus Pro SME Workshops. In addition to the SME Workshops, the Nexus Pro community also meets monthly for Pro Member Gatherings.

Pro Member Gatherings are the thought-provoking and community-building sessions you didn’t realize were missing from your life. We start with 15-minute breakout rooms where you are paired with a random group of smart building professionals and given an ice-breaker industry-related topic to discuss. This allows you to mingle with passionate changemakers working on problems that are shockingly similar to what you’re working on. After that, we hand it off to a building owner to discuss their smart building strategy and where they are in the saga. Finally, we close it out with an invigorating Q&A.

The vibe of Pro Member Gatherings is collaborative and non-salesy. We get an intimate view of the smart building programs of prominent, well-respected organizations, breaking down the industry dogma that effective strategies should be kept secret from your peers.

If you’re considering joining us at NexusCon 2024, these building-owner-led talks are a great example of the content we'll have at the conference. Over 140 building owner personas will be present at the conference, many of whom will share their stories, giving you an unparalleled perspective into what’s really going on in our industry.

Pro Member Gatherings are only available to Nexus Pro Members. Nexus Pro is a community of nearly 600 changemakers who, cumulatively, know every nook and cranny of the smart buildings industry and what it will take to digitize and decarbonize the built environment. If you want to join, check it out HERE.

Have a gander at the Pro Member Gatherings from last year below. If you’re not a Nexus Pro Member, we wanted to give you a chance to experience one of these sessions.  We’ve unlocked one of our favorite Pro Member Gatherings on the General Service Administration's Smart Buildings Program by Ana Rawson, the Chief Facilities Technology Officer of the GSA, so that all of you non-members can get a taste of what it’s like to be a Pro Member. You can access it HERE and below.

‍

The General Service Administration's Smart Buildings Program

The GSA's Chief Facilities Technology Officer, Ana Rawson, communicates the administration’s strategy for creating a portfolio of operationally efficient and energy-efficient government buildings. The GSA has a commitment to a net-zero portfolio by 2045. Today, over 636 buildings are networked through GSA Link, its SkySpark-based system with FDD and CMMS integration capabilities. The GSA’s approach moving forward is based on the acronym SONIC: Secure, Open Protocols, Normalized Data, Interoperability, Converged Networks.

FREE PREVIEW into Pro Member Gatherings for non-Nexus Pro Members

CU Boulder's Smart Buildings Program

Nick Clements, an Instructor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, shares the CU Boulder BEST (Building Energy Smart Technologies) Research Center program. This program collaborates with smart building organizations like Rheem, Xcel Energy, ConEdison, and Cardinal Glass to create academic research projects exploring new industry frontiers. Nick facilitated a thought-provoking discussion about what skills need to be taught to students to develop excellent smart-building professionals of the future.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

Duke University's Smart Buildings Program

Casey Collins, the Director of Utility and Energy Services at Duke University, conveys the complex Duke ecosystem as an energy producer and consumer. In 2007, Duke set out to be carbon-neutral by 2024. Casey explains how they’re getting there, how they decide which new energy conservation measures to invest in, and how they strategically use carbon offsets and building efficiency improvements to maintain carbon neutrality.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

University of Nebraska's Smart Buildings Program

Nate Benes, Director of Operational Technology at the University of Nebraska, elucidates the university’s unique achievement of being its own building automation vendor. From the physical controllers to the building automation software platform, the university develops everything in-house, integrating its need for smart buildings into its education and research.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

NREL's Smart Buildings Program

Michelle Slovensky, Intelligent Campus Program Manager at NREL, reveals the programs that NREL hosts within its own buildings to help mature new technologies so that commercial partners can start to adopt similar solutions. Michelle covered NREL’s digital twin platform and approach to a connected microgrid as examples from which the commercial industry can learn. The session concludes with a group discussion on how commercial stakeholders can get more involved in NREL initiatives.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

Demo Edition: WattCarbon, Mapped, and Exergenics

WattCarbon, Mapped, and Exergenics all performed 10-minute demonstrations of their newest product features. Wattcarbon showed us their ability to be the facilitator of VPPAs (virtual power purchase agreements) so that companies can actually profit from their decarbonization investments to help accelerate renewable energy projects. Mapped introduced MappedGPT, their large language model that allows you to query building data conversationally (e.g., “retrieve all spaces fed by AHU-1”). Finally, Exergenics showed how they can provide the optimum condenser water temperature setpoint using their cloud-based machine learning model based on historical plant data.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

Nuveen's Smart Sustainable Building Blueprint

Skylar Huth, Director at Nuveen Real Estate, outlined Nuveen’s strategy to have smarter buildings and meet their net-zero carbon by 2040 goal. The approach, termed the Smart Sustainable Building Blueprint, is the result of surveying stakeholders from hundreds of their buildings to create a universal roadmap to leveling up all of their properties. For example, Nuveen has rolled out a real-time energy monitoring system across its portfolio to catch issues and anomalies quicker and save more energy.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

Demo Edition: Clockworks Analytics, Kaiterra, and 75F

Clockworks Analytics, Kaiterra, and 75F all performed 10-minute demonstrations of their newest product features. Clockworks Analytics dove into their diagnostics output, which helps facilities teams determine the most expensive issues in their buildings that are most important to address. Kaiterra demo’d the Kaiterra Platform, where you can get insights and analysis on building compliance and comfort from Kaiterra sensors. 75F displayed their LLM, which allows users to conversationally pull data via chat. The LLM is trained on data from all 75F-controlled buildings, making it extremely robust.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

Jamestown's Smart Buildings Program

Carrie Denning Jackson, Director of Innovation at Jamestown LP, portrayed the Jamestown approach to smart buildings. Carrie shared success stories in energy management, PV installation, and parking management platforms, as well as how Jamestown’s extremely diverse building type and age creates a complex set of building upgrade requirements.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

The Great IoT Sensor Debate

Liam Bates, CEO of Kaiterra, Tom Balme, National Building Services & Technologies Manager at Lendlease, and David Sciarrino, VP of business development at Kterio, debate the pros and cons of IoT sensors with recurring fees. The concepts of vendor lock-in, converged networks, and user/manufacturer incentives make this a complex question on which the experts have developed strong opinions.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

Mirvac's Smart Buildings Program

Tyrone Mawing, Asset Technology Manager at Mirvac, an Australian property management group, delves into Mirvac’s goal to create buildings that “rapidly respond to the evolving needs of their tenants.” Particularly, Tyrone talks about the importance of converged networks in making operational technology data easy to access and cyber secure.

Nexus Pro Members can access it here

‍

Is this the type of content you’d like to hear at NexusCon? Message us to let us know.

– James and the Nexus Labs Team