Controls and Green Building Certifications
Although any building may be built or retrofitted with various enhanced green characteristics, significant advantages exist in obtaining building certification by one of the “green” organizations, such as ENERGY STAR® and the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) Green Building Rating System. A building’s certification provides proof of its triple bottom line.
KMC Controls has been a member of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) since the early days of the organization. The USGBC is a non-profit organization committed to a prosperous and sustainable future for our nation through cost-efficient and energy-saving green buildings. According to the USGBC, buildings in the United States are responsible for 39% of CO2 emissions, 40% of energy consumption, 13% water consumption and 15% of the gross domestic product per year, making green buildings sources of significant economic and environmental opportunity.
Green buildings are found in many sectors, and KMC products have been minimizing energy use while optimizing occupant comfort in many government, school, hospital, hotel, office, and other commercial buildings for decades. To help you obtain green certification as well as ensure that your facility operates as it was initially designed, KMC provides a comprehensive approach to automating systems within commercial and institutional facilities. Our systems can manage heating, ventilating, and air conditioning as well as smoke control, lighting control, daylight harvesting, rainwater harvesting and landscape irrigation, power and utility (including alternate energy sources) monitoring/management, data collection with logging and trending, and a host of other applications.
Whether your green building is small or large, KMC’s products can play critical roles in attaining certification in the LEED, ENERGY STAR, or other ratings systems. For example, KMC controllers, sensors, and software can play key roles in satisfying the prerequisites and credits in the Energy and Atmosphere (constituting 25% of the total points) and Indoor Environmental Quality (22% of the total) categories for LEED New Construction and Major Renovation.
For instance, when attaining (the highest) LEED Platinum certification, the Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College had KMC direct digital controllers, sensors, and software working together to monitor and log building system performance factors such as heat pump fluid temperatures, current generated by photovoltaic arrays and a wind turbine (to get credit from the utility company), as well as other environmental conditions.
When attaining the ENERGY STAR label, the Wachovia Bank Building in Tampa Florida used software and over 300 BACnet controllers manufactured by KMC Controls. The HVAC controls retrofit, which replaced an obsolete system, provided an additional monthly energy savings of 10% over the previous system. In addition to energy savings, it also included CO2 monitors to enhance the air quality and help meet qualifications to pursue LEED Gold certification.
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