November 16, 2009—Convia/A Herman Miller Company, has been selected as the lighting control provider for pre-built offices as part of the $20 million dollar Empire State Building retrofit project. Targeted at making the landmark a model of sustainability and propelling the nation’s interest in green building retrofits, the project is expected to reduce energy use and carbon emissions in the building by approximately 40 percent and put it within the top 10 percent of all energy efficient buildings worldwide.
The Empire State Building retrofit project is led by a team of consulting, design and construction partners, including the Clinton Climate Initiative, Johnson Controls Inc. (JCI), Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) and Rocky Mountain Institute. The Convia technology, on display at November’s United States Green Building Council’s (USGBC) annual Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, will play a critical role in the energy management of the Empire State Building’s pre-built tenant spaces, which other tenants may use as a model for energy efficiency within their own spaces. The building owners are looking to tenant participation to reduce energy consumption by 17 percent.
Convia is installed in a prototype office space on the building’s 42nd floor, which has been set up to reflect a Platinum LEED office. New and renewing tenants can visit the prototype for ideas on how they can design for maximum efficiency as well as employee productivity and comfort. Nearly 40 percent of tenant space will come up for renewal in the next four years.
Together, HVAC (30-35 percent), lighting (30-40 percent) and plug loads/office equipment (12-18 percent) account for nearly 93 percent of total energy use within a building. Convia addresses all three of these areas with a simple and intelligent controls and management platform. Within the prototype space, the Convia technology offers a whole building level of control, providing sustainable solutions for everything from the building infrastructure to the individual workstation, including new advancements in plug load control through Herman Miller’s Energy Manager device.
Energy Manager, which is embedded in Herman Miller’s Intent and Ethospace workstations in the space, is a device that senses occupancy and controls power in the company’s systems furniture to save energy and lower costs. When a person sits down to work, an occupancy sensor detects their presence and turns on the devices in the cluster plugged into those two circuits, known as plug loads (e.g. task lights, printers, monitors or chargers). When the cluster is unoccupied, the devices automatically shut off. With plug load energy expected to rise by 70 percent over the next decade, Energy Manager provides an effective solution to control this energy.
Other key components of Convia that are integrated into the prototype space include: occupancy sensors; thermostat set-points; daylight dimming; wall switches; wand, for virtual wiring.
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