Cities around the world, are creating public-private initiatives around sustainability and liveability goals, and they’re being intelligent about it. Intelligent cities support their goal-setting processes with IT solutions that enable benchmarking, measurement, and achievement.
 
These intelligent cities depend on smart buildings. After all, building efficiency is central to both sustainability and liveability.  In setting goals for building efficiency, cities take a range of approaches. Some make buildings’ “Energy Star” scores public in reports; others publish general “Energy Star” performance without naming specific buildings. Still others have begun by releasing general statistics, with a plan to start naming individual buildings’ scores at a set date in the future.
 
Across these varied approaches, there are a couple of key elements in common: cities are benchmarking using ‘Energy Star’  standards, and counting on the very measurement of efficiency – whether made public or kept private – to be a motivating factor for ongoing improvement.
 
This is where intelligent building technology solutions come in. Setting energy benchmarks for a whole city requires consistent measurement and meaningful reporting on a scale beyond the building or portfolio level. New cloud-based solutions are helping communities meet that need, offering scalable solutions that can work with other platforms and building systems.
 
On the most fundamental level, Johnson Controls can help businesses comply with legislation based on ‘Energy Star’, doing the “heavy lifting” for energy managers when it comes to data and reporting. Cloud-based applications, such as Carbon and Energy Reporter (CER) can provide customised ‘Energy Star’ reports based on utility bill data – all in a matter of minutes, instead of the hours it would take to pull and report on this data manually.
 
And that’s just one way evolving technologies can help. The ever-expanding universe of applications can help businesses manage energy and maintenance costs, reduce environmental impact, enhance occupant comfort, and increase the value of their buildings – all while providing the data needed to verify savings and compliance.
 
In fact, to help cities set and meet their sustainability and liveability goals Johnson Controls has recently partnered with Microsoft’s CityNext initiative. CityNext takes a people-first approach to creating better communities, with “buildings, infrastructure & planning” as a key area of focus. CityNext aims to bring together technological innovation and industry-leading expertise to help cities provide sustainable services – a perfect fit with Johnson Controls’ Panoptix, which offers a whole community of expertise and support around its advanced technological solutions. Through the partnership with CityNext, Johnson Controls will support people in delivering buildings that are more efficient and sustainable. In turn, we’ll be helping cities to meet their goals, now and into the future.