GO GREEN / LEED Consulting

This article was written by Chris Thorman.

For years, both commercial and residential property managers have adhered to a fixed set of job responsibilities – collecting rent, coordinating maintenance requests, renewing leases and attracting new residents.

One more job responsibility – managing and forecasting a building’s carbon footprint – should be added, according to Ross Sharman, director of Australia-based Knowledge Global and Oracle Magazine’s 2009 Green IT Architect of the Year.

Sharman and Knowledge Global, a sustainability consultancy, have created a comprehensive, automated environmental monitoring system for buildings called EMMA (Environmental Management Solution). The EMMA system is a solution for property owners and managers who want to measure, track and forecast exactly how much energy a building is using/losing, while simultaneously educating their tenants about their carbon output.

The EMMA system gathers environmental data from a variety of electronic monitors inside and outside of a building. This data is aggregated by a variety of software applications and displayed in a digital user interface. The information provides an ongoing snapshot of the “health” of the building.

Metrics the EMMA system measures and how they are tracked include:

• Gas, water, electricity use, waste and weather information through the monitoring of meters
• Human traffic through security systems and thermal imaging technology similar to what shopping centers use
• Occupant demographics through tenant profiling and human resources
• Building space through floor plans and tenant agreements
• Well-being of occupants through online surveys

There are a handful of services out there that monitor building energy use but none of them modify behavior like the EMMA system does.

The EMMA monitor in the lobby of buildings displays energy use by floor, room and even by tenant. This makes it easy to organize competitions that motivate tenants to reduce the amount of energy they are using.

EMMA’s wireless “eggs” are another visual incentive for reducing tenants’ carbon footprint.  These egg-shaped devices sit throughout a building – in common areas and on each floor, for example – and glow red or green as energy use fluctuates against the optimal forecast. This constant reminder about energy use encourages tenants to use less, or at least, makes them aware of energy use in areas they may have not even thought about before.

You can read more about EMMA here.

Chris Thorman contributed this post. He blogs at Software Advice.“

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