Coordinating Fault Detection, Alarm Management, and Energy Efficiency in a Large Corporate Campus

Microsoft sought to reduce energy use on its Puget Sound campus by enhancing analysis of energy consumption and building system optimization. The pilot project focused on 13 diverse buildings, representing 2.6 million square feet and equipped with various building management systems. An analytical layer above the existing building management systems was deployed to provide a consolidated view of granular energy use across all of the buildings and generate actionable data to improve maintenance and efficiency. This higher-level software focuses on: 1) fault detection and diagnosis; 2) alarm management; and 3) energy management analytics. Applying these tools to the entire Microsoft campus allows energy use to be analyzed and managed at the campus level as opposed to the individual building level. The ability to analyze data streams to identify building faults and inefficiencies in near real-time proved to be one of the most important benefits of the technology. Management systems in existing buildings generate hundreds of alarms per day, ranging from critical problems to informational messages. The software quantifies energy losses from each identified fault in terms of dollars per year and potential saved energy (kWh), automatically receives the alarm priority from each system and aggregates the alarms for reporting. This integrated energy management system allows Microsoft to improve building system performance and minimize building base load and consumption. Early results show that complete implementation of the system has the potential to reduce energy consumption by 6-10% on the Puget Sound campus at costs that meet Microsoft’s internal standards for ROI.