As the P&L leader, Siddhartha helps transform Honeywell Building Automation’s electrical business by spearheading breakthrough initiatives based on embedded software definition, IoT connectivity, machine data, and cloud services.
Siddhartha helps direct Connected Power, which entails a digital transformation of Honeywell's electrical business to help make it more intelligent, connected, and data-driven so that analytics can help drive decision-making and improve outcomes:
Connectivity at scaleIn commercial buildings, thousands of electrical outlets can be connected and managed at scale. The building management system must incorporate remote device management to operate JS controllers, unit controllers, plant controllers, and VA controllers from anywhere. The challenge, according to Siddhartha, is to achieve this on the scale of hundreds of thousands of connected systems in different outlets. “The management platform must remain consistent to become part of the building management system,” he said. “It needs to be familiar to the operator and must behave like an extension of any building management system that controls, monitors, and reports the expectations for the connected power.”
Even with the fundamental use of managing an electrical wiring device or an outlet or something connected to an outlet, operators can do a lot to help optimize based on connectivity and data. The strategic focus is energy management, sustainability, and using the data for better planning and optimization.
For example, envision hundreds or thousands of laptops, desktop PCs, coffee machines, and printers in every commercial building. Each has a particular schedule: a coffee machine functions on weekdays but not on the weekends, which is a consideration for energy management. Specific machines must always be on, and there must be a way to add connectivity and control for scheduling at scale to every device inside a commercial building. This ability to plan and monitor devices at scale has now become a fundamental capability within the Connected Power workstream, Siddhartha points out.
According to the GSA, plug loads can account for 25% or more of a building load, but by implementing an automated schedule that switches off all printers after 8 p.m. on Fridays and switches them back on at 8 a.m. on Mondays, as well as powering them down after close of business on weekdays, building operators can extract energy savings.
“Building owners can gain energy cost savings by ensuring certain devices are off when not in use,” Siddhartha said “However, building owners can benefit from using connectivity to ensure critical devices always remain powered on. In this instance, the reverse use case is applied, where you monitor and create alerts if a particular device goes down, such as critical life and safety equipment.”
According to Siddhartha, another area seeing a lot of relevance is safety. These Connected Power outlets are built-in with automatic temperature control through which incidents of overheating can be monitored and mitigated.
In many cases, patrons will plug in a long extender with multiple outlets to charge their various electronic devices, drawing more power than the outlet can deliver and leading to overheating scenarios at the outlet level. Outlets on the Honeywell Connected Power program are monitored and can send building managers alerts based on temperature fluctuations at the outlet itself. The outlets in question can be flagged when drawing significantly elevated power and pose a risk of overheating. Once a certain temperature or power draw is observed that particular outlet can be switched off.
“Commercial building outlets today are not controlled or intelligent, but we see a growing demand for this technology. Those are the two key factors that make it part of the natural building system, and we have already begun to hear from customers interested in this technology,” Siddhartha said.
Connected Power's insight and management dashboard can support the need for sustainability reporting, energy savings, and optimal equipment utilization and health.
Connectivity to the Internet of Things (IoT) is critical to achieving desired energy savings and efficiency when managing multiple sites. In quick-service restaurants, Honeywell is installing IoT gateways, connecting outlets and devices, and pushing them to the cloud.
The first stage is simple on/off power control. The second stage includes temperature monitoring and alerts for unsafe conditions.
The third stage involves a critical device, such as a refrigerator. A refrigerator should behave in a particular pattern. For example, we saw a fascinating use case from one university. The institution has a high-temperature freezer that they use to store experiments. The laboratory must keep samples under negative 40 degrees Celsius, and the samples are at risk when the internal temperature drops below that level for more than 30 minutes. This could risk years of research and experiments. To avoid such instances, they currently use two freezers with redundant tests and samples. However, risk remains for both units to go down simultaneously.
The solution is round-the-clock monitoring, Siddhartha said. “If a unit goes down, a notification is sent. But the lingering challenge was that even in the event of a late-night alert, responders would still have only 30 minutes to rectify the situation,” he explained. “To address this, power data was pushed to the cloud and through an analytics engine that records the power flow. By doing this, users can analyze the standard electrical performance of each unit.” For example, if a compressor is drawing more power than normal, we can flag it. Event-based signature analytics is the next phase, which could be significantly relevant.”
Consider the restaurant business: dependent on its fryers, coffee, and ice cream machines. These are high-power-drawing equipment critical for that restaurant’s continuity. “Anything that tells me that my refrigerator or fryer is at risk of going down, an early alarm could be significantly beneficial,” Siddhartha said. “That's where these IoT devices come in and where being connected with the ability to monitor at scale is so important.”
For more information about Connected Power visit here.
Image from Honeywell's Environmental Sustainability Program