Buildings are the cornerstone of modern smart cities, and in the digital economy, a new breed of buildings is emerging. Advances in mobile, cloud-based and IoT technologies are creating enormous opportunities for information gathering, sharing, and analytics impacting the way buildings are run. 

In parallel, occupants demand more and more control over their workspace,  driven by a “there’s an app for that” mentality. Today, this technology is evolving and can help re-invent buildings and people’s experience living in them.

Here are some key megatrends behind the changes impacting cities and buildings for the years to come.

1. The Greatest Urbanisation Of All Times

As many as 2.5 billion people are expected to migrate to cities by 2050. At a global level, it is the equivalent of building 30 cities the size of Paris every year for the next 30 years!

This migration creates tensions for buildings developers and owners, and for city planners. Specifically, it drives the need for more:

• Energy efficiency and integration of renewable energies
• Space efficiency and occupant and user comfort.
• Talent attraction and retention
• More stringent regulation

2. Pervasive Digitisation

The growth of data, information and connected devices is exponential.  In 2014, there were an estimated 1.7 billion connected devices in buildings worldwide. That number will more than triple to reach 5.5 billion by 2020.

This digitisation will boost market demand for:

• Sensors, beacons and other devices to gather data
• Technology that efficiently gives access to data: high-speed network infrastructure (IP), OT systems that expose their data naturally, data repositories in the cloud
• Artificial Intelligence and analytics to sort through data and drive insight and outcomes from this data
• A multiplication of apps for everyone to solve actual paint points for building occupants, owners, facility managers

3. Rising Electricity consumption

The world electricity consumption will increase by 60 per cent in the next 20 years, and close to 60 per cent of that electricity is used in buildings – and this is a conservative forecast!

At a time of climate change, this will drive increasing need for:

• Self-generation and microgrids based on Solar with local storage
• Source management to be able to manage various energy sources at a building or campus level
• More local power management systems to ensure electrical power reliability
• Also, a renewed push towards more energy efficiency

Overall, we see that these megatrends are creating a number of challenges for our cities.

The stakes are high: will the 2.5 billion people migrating to cities by 2050 enjoy a connected, peaceful, modern lifestyle?

A big part of the answer is to design buildings in a new way so that they utilise less resources (space, energy) and they run at maximum efficiency. Buildings must also meet the growing demand for meaningful connectivity that responds to the individual needs of occupants.

That’s what we’re doing at Schneider Electric– designing buildings differently.  We are re-inventing buildings with open, innovative technology that allows for greater comfort and productivity for building occupants, enabling facility managers to deliver the next level of efficiency in buildings, and ensuring our systems integrators and EcoXpert partners win and grow through simplified commissioning and integrated systems. Visit our EcoStruxure Building website to learn more.

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