Background

The Al Seef Tower is a 43-story luxury high-rise residential building located in Dubai Marina. In 2016, the Client engaged an ESCO in a 5-year Energy Performance Contract, for which they co-invested 50% of the total CapEx.

In 2021, upon the termination of ESCO’s contract, the tower had over 1.1 mAED of savings-at-stake. Based on our benchmarks, a typical building loses 5% to 10% of its savings per annum upon the ESCOs departure in the absence of adequate controls and energy management capabilities. Ark Energy was then engaged by community manager (Three60) on behalf of the Owners Association to investigate the existing building condition and recommend practical and cost-effective solutions to maintain the tower’s condition and savings.

Ark Energy concluded a thorough assessment for Al-Seef Tower of the ESCO’s M&V plan and savings, Investment Grade Audit (detailed IGA) and Energy Savings Performance Contract, the retrofit works completed by the ESCO (intent and actual), and Internal Environment Quality (IEQ) of the tower. Based on the assessment and detailed analysis, Ark Energy proposed a list of measures including retro-commissioning of the tower, and integrating our digital cloud-based platform, arkEMIS, to provide live high-definition data-capture, monitoring, energy end-use analysis and automated reporting based on international standards to support operational efficiency and energy reduction. This will be the ideal way to maintain the 1.1 mAED of savings-at-stake that have already been attained after the energy performance contract term ends.

Problems to be solved

The BMS consists of Schneider building operator workstation software and automation servers to manage and control the electromechanical devices in the premise. Although the automation servers are BTL listed BACnet controllers, these are not enabled, and a proprietary communication exists between the operator workstation and controllers. Without an open standards interface and software integration by third party, this is not possible. Current system has limited rights credential, restricting a re-programming to enable BACnet/IP server points. The existing system had some undesirable control strategies not acceptable to the Employer.

Solution

arkEMIS’ consultants provided a retro-commissioning of the existing BMS, as well as reprogramming of the existing BMS controllers. Further to the retro-commissioning, the consultant mapped out all the data points and BACnet/IP server points which shall be read and written to from third party BACnet clients.

Ark Energy installed its Universal Box (Gateway) and integrated the BMS on site via the arkEMIS RESTful API allowing the electricity use data from the IoT sensors to be sent to arkEMIS energy analytics dashboard for analysis.

Results

Sub metered areas and appliances such as air conditioning units, fans, pumps, MDBs were connected to arkEMIS and incoming data from monitored circuits was ready for analysis in a matter of minutes. With arkEMIS, Al Seef is now able to:

• Monitor and track energy consumption in real time
• Alert /notify facility personnel of energy spikes and abnormalities in consumption
• Benchmark and compare energy consumption trends
• Perform operations wastage analysis to identify areas of energy waste and opportunities for savings
• Save time and money, having a unified platform through which all monitored circuits consumption data is visible
• No more manual data collection
• Incorporate historical data to view trends over time
• Work with an easy-to-use platform and interface to get the job done
• Document energy analysis and savings for dissemination