Innovations - Global

submitted by Albert Gomez

energymanagertoday.com - August 7, 2013

With commercial building operators facing pressure to reduce energy consumption and IT-based controls and monitoring becoming widespread, a perfect storm of factors has led to new software platforms for building energy management systems (BEMS), says Navigant Research, which predicts that the BEMS market will grow from $1.8 billion to $5.6 billion by 2020.

The Navigant report, Building Energy Management Systems — IT-Based Monitoring and Control Systems for Smart Buildings: Global Market Analysis and Forecasts, says the BEMS market represents one of the fastest-growing and most promising waves of innovation ever to occur in the building industry.

It cites factors such as the increased knowledge and proliferation of digital controls within the building stock in the industry, the high priority focus on energy efficiency among corporations and governments, and the advent of cloud-based data management and Big Data as the reason behind the explosive development of the BEMS market.

July 1, 2013 — A slum on the outskirts of Accra, Ghana, received major media attention in 2010 and 2011 when the outside world realized where computers go to die. In an area called Agbogbloshie, impoverished residents were burning broken electronic parts, discarded and dumped by wealthier nations, to extract the metal components. Crouched around bonfires, they inhaled toxic smoke and unwittingly leached heavy metals into a nearby river, just to eke out a living.

Harvard undergraduate Rachel Field '12, an engineering sciences concentrator, read the news reports and devoted her senior thesis project to addressing the problem.

mashable.com - by Vignesh Ramachandran - June 7, 2013