Smart Building Success Stories and Lessons Learned for Municipalities

Despite the typical challenges faced by the public sector, Mandy Omrani and Infrastructure Ontario have found continued success over their years-long Smart Green program. Across a portfolio of 4,000 public assets managed by the Province of Ontario, only 340 of them have building management systems. Within that group, an even smaller sub-set have been enrolled in the program that Omrani has managed for the past year. But she’s having success and the program is growing.

In the July Pro Member Gathering, Omrani shared details on the program, the Province’s diverse portfolio and the forward momentum they’ve gained through creative problem solving. If you're a pro member catch the replay in our community platform, Nexus Connect. Watch here.

For the Province of Ontario, the goal is to modernize their buildings and they define their Smart Green program with these pillars:

-         Reduce GHG

-         Enhance cybersecurity

-         Use data to drive capital and operationaldecisions

-         Standardize operations and alarming

Before the smart buildings program, which is within the Real Estate Services division of Province organization and sits side by side with Energy and Sustainability but not directly part of it, Omrani says it was very difficult for them to manage their portfolio because nothing within the building was standard.

“As you can imagine with the old and aging portfolio that we have, we had so many different vendors, so many different system configurations. It was really difficult for us to manage a portfolio and the buildings [especially when] there is no standard. We had so many different types of alarms there were so many situations that critical alarms were missed.”

Their open-source, cloud-based solution has allowed them to eliminate vendor lock-in and execute various energy reduction strategies and hit operational improvement targets. Notably, they’re achieving a 3.5 year pay back period. One standout integration so far for Omrani has been to bring the CMMS system into the smart building platform.

“With integration to the CMMS system we brought a lot of efficiency and we were able to prove that we reduced the GHG by eliminating truck rolls and things like that,” she said.

While there are currently 49 buildings totaling 6.5 million square feet, by early 2024, they will have 75 buildings in the system.

Case studies and thinking outside the box

Courthouse ABC

For the Province of Ontario, their Courthouse asset class is of the most energy intensive. So they benchmarked it. For the year 2018-2019,Omrani explained, a single courthouse in their portfolio had an EUI (energy usage intensity) of 27.81. After joining the Smart Green program, EUI for the year 2021-2022 was 22.33, a 19.7% reduction in energy usage.

What might stand out about that measurement year is it’s at the heart of Covid lockdowns and the new ventilation and air quality guidelines that came with them.

In describing this impressive reduction, Omrani explained something that might come across as a surprising dichotomy to some – many of the recommended measures for safe indoor air quality cause spikes in EUI. She noted the ASHRAE guidelines and offered these details:

“Increasing the outdoor fresh air and bypassing the energy and heat recovery within the building … actually increase the energy usage intensity. Even considering all of those elements, we will had 19.7 % energy improvement within that particular building.”

So she’s taken that proven use case as she and the IO team “live this journey that we put together and are continuing to stand alongside.”

Demand control ventilation using occupancy data

For Omrani, the road to demand control ventilation has followed a more circuitous path. It wasn’t hard to convince people within Infrastructure Ontario that demand control ventilation based on occupancy data was a good idea, but they couldn’t afford to introduce new occupancy sensors across their portfolio.

“It was cost prohibitive so we had to be innovative and we had to think outside of the box.”

The solution was to use systems that were already tracking the data they needed.

“Considering all of the challenges that you could have within a public sector, the viable solution was to look at the occupancy sensor data from the lighting system.”

She promises to come back to the Nexus community after she has results to share from the pilot they’re running on this right now.

Omrani and her team are also engaged in pilot projects for EV charging in accordance with the Province’s mandate to include EV charging at every building. They’re planning to bring that EV charging data into the Smart Green platform.

What’s next?

Omrani was very clear that this goes way beyond HVAC.

“My role and mandate is to develop a plan and a strategy for the future of the smart building infrastructure within Infrastructure Ontario. So I have a vision that we go full stack with everything that we have within the building – you all know – the building systems that we have with the lighting with the video security system with all the components that we have. And on top of that, we would like to go to the next generation of a smart building and making it intelligent.”

For Omrani and IO, that means integrating with AI and ML technology and working toward a smart city. But she realizes this doesn’t happen overnight.

“It’s going to be between today and the next 10 years that we are developing this.”

And she’s happy to keep putting one foot in front of the other to realize this vision one data set at a time.

If you missed the event, check the Gathering Recording section of the community page for the full session when it's available.