May 15, 2012 - “Building Information Modelling (BIM) will change everything,” said Dennis Neeley (SmartBIM), noting that “the change is becoming very evident [and] is happening at unprecedented speed.”

May 9, 2012 - Buildings consume the bulk of the world’s energy (nearly 40%), so the building industry has been focusing on sustainability, efficiency and practical energy-saving solutions for both new construction and retrofits.

May 7, 2012 - It has never been clearer that the true convergence and anywhere collaboration that we all seek will be found in a cloud. The marriage of social media as data and its embedded human opinion will seamlessly mesh with real time data, shoulder to shoulder in large databases in a concept now being billed as Big Data or Data as a Service “DaaS”. To move to DaaS means that data—not applications—leads. That’s a significant shift in thinking. We need to adjust our focus to making sure our clients leverage data in the best ways possible to foster innovation.

April 25, 2012 - As corporate computing requirements grow steadily and consumer-focused IT services continue their rapid expansion, the demand for data centre capacity continues to rise. The rapid adoption of IT use in the emerging economies is also providing a powerful engine for the growth of data centre capacity. In turn, the growth in demand is further increasing these facilities’ energy footprint.

April 24, 2012 - The HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system... it's designed to be all about comfort, but it can become all about cost if it's not well set-up and maintained. Here are five hot tips that can help cool HVAC costs.

April 24, 2012 - Commercial building owners in the States could save an average of 38% on their heating and cooling bills were they to install a “handful of energy efficiency controls” that make their HVAC systems more energy efficient.

When it comes to the development of renewable energy in Canada, many Canadian provinces and territories (if not all) looked to Ontario’s Green Energy Act and, more specifically, its FIT (feed-in-tariff) and microFIT programs for successes and failures. Depending on where you fit into the social fabric, your opinion will range anywhere from resounding success to complete and abysmal failure, never to repeated.

Proponents of the program steadfastly maintain that, especially for a have-not province, Ontario needed to do something to stimulate the economy. Meantime, detractors have always maintained the program is unsustainable. Which is why industry stakeholders waited with baited breath for the results of the government’s two-year FIT Program Review, which came out last month, and considered issues such as:

April 5, 2012 - 'Interacting with Energy' is a play on words at several levels. Our daily interaction manipulating energy must be done with a lot of personal energy, but now involves interaction with our energy source the smart grid. In addition the tools of our industry such as wireless sensors are now starting to use energy harvesting to interact with energy on a micro scale and if this is not enough interaction, we are now starting to interact with the building envelope, fenestration, onsite energy generation with renewables and the list goes on. Please join me in our interaction with energy on so many levels.

March 24, 2012 - The exterior environment of a building envelope is subject to ever-changing environmental conditions such as wind, humidity, rain, sun and ambient temperature. One of the most significant influences on the building envelope design is the sun. The sun is composed of ultraviolet, visible and infrared light that is dynamic and constantly changing relative to the building. Designs that do not take the sun’s influence into account can subject the occupants of the building to conditions such as uncomfortable glare, solar heat gain, variable temperatures, and the early decay of fabrics, and surfaces that fade over time.

March 14, 2012 - Managing a commercial or warehouse facility poses challenges on a daily basis. And one of them is making the facility profitable.

March 14, 2012 - Wireless is a “now” movement in our industry that we all need to better understand.

From healing and care delivered to thousands of patients over the lifetime of a hospital facility, to the protection of terabytes of sensitive data in a “server farm” data centre, buildings are the unsung heroes in our work. Over the years, these “silent partners” suffer deterioration from aging, causing the building envelope to falter or fail. In some cases, this is readily apparent; for example, when daylight peeks through seismic joints at a pedestrian bridge or when mould from water intrusion becomes an air quality concern. From a budget perspective, energy costs creep upward as HVAC systems work harder to keep up with heating and cooling that escapes the building.