Johnson Controls on Monday opened a new cloud-based apps marketplace intended to help commercial-building owners and operators save energy and money.
The marketplace offers 17 apps so far, five of which were developed by third parties on the Panoptix platform, the company said.
Among others, these include apps that keep track of tenants' utilities, monitor buildings' energy performance and display the amount of carbon emissions each building, or group of buildings, is responsible for. The idea -- expressed as "See a bigger picture" by Panoptix -- is to help building owners and managers see energy trends across buildings, making it easier for them to find ways to reduce energy consumption, for example, or to see anomalies that could indicate fixable problems.
The apps are all based on Johnson Controls' Panoptix energy-management platform, introduced last year. The company earlier this month made its application programming interfaces (APIs) available to developers so they could begin designing apps for the marketplace.
This last weekend, Johnson Controls offered up the Panoptix APIs at GreenBiz's Hack City in a sponsored challenge. The winning challenge from InSite developed an app to benchmark building energy consumption and compare usage among other buildings in a portfolio. Building managers can then share these results through social media (Facebook and Twitter).
While the HackCity challenge is intended to spur developer interest in Johnson Controls commercial building apps, the launch of a marketplace brings a needed channel for startups like First Fuel, Lucid, EnergyPoints, T4G and FirstFuel to sell their wares.
The marketplace is free for property owners, but they pay for the apps and vendors pay to connect. Johnson Controls also gets data out of the deal. Customers must agree to provide data in order to use these apps, and Johnson Controls also will have access to that data.
VERGE editor Derek Top contributed to this report. Image of binary digital city by Leszek Glasner via Shutterstock.
"Marketplace" , I think it is
"Marketplace" , I think it is a great application, Johnson control is big name that has always taken great initiatives in energy conservation and we should congratulate them for this effort. Ont only this but they are also providing API for further enhancement in "Marketplace".
@David Bearg: IAQ is
@David Bearg: IAQ is certainly important, but you need to deal with each issue on its own. It's really a long stretch to conclude that reduced lighting = reduced cooling = reduced airflow = problem IAQ. Sure the links are there, I get it. But please, try opening the minimum OA damper position.
Dear Colleagues: In my
Dear Colleagues:
In my experience, efforts to conserve energy all too often end up being penny wise and dollar foolish as these efforts end up degrading IAQ and cause losses in productivity. I wonder if Johnson Controls is considering this fact and taking any steps to prevent this from happening? For example, in one building served by a VAV system a lighting retrofit saved 5% of the building energy use or $0.15/SF. Since there was less waste heat for the cooling system to deal with, less air came out of the VAV boxes and this resulted in ventilation deficiencies, which in turn resulted in a 2% loss in productivity, the value of this loss being $6/SF.
Just a word to the wise to try an avoid this kind of mistake.