That’s the feeling I had when I got into my Tesla for the first time. The interior climate was just right, my favorite Spotify list started playing and the navigation was automatically set for exactly where I wanted to be. The autopilot might not be 100 percent self-driving, but it does an amazing job on the highway, neatly keeping a safe distance and staying perfectly in lane. You immediately know this is the future of driving, 100 percent electric and sustainable to boot. Another Tesla fan was born.
We want to give our customers that same feeling with Priva ECO. Just as Tesla turned driving a car into a completely new futuristic and sustainable experience, we are transforming conventional buildings into self-steering systems that think for themselves and make their own decisions about the indoor climate and energy usage. As stand-alone buildings, but equally as part of an energy grid, a city or even an entire Sustainable Urban Delta.
Just imagine: self-thinking algorithms controlling a building’s climate installations from the cloud. When the solar panels are producing energy, the algorithms immediately turn on the heat pumps. When there’s too much energy, they create a buffer to be used when there’s a shortage. It’s smart technology and it never stops thinking, 24/7. With just one objective: an optimal indoor climate for everyone in the building, at every moment of every day, using renewable energy to the maximum.
It may all sound like science fiction, but it’s not. ecoBuilding is already controlling a large number of buildings, greenhouses, and other installations. Not just in the Netherlands, not just in Priva buildings, but all over the world, working with Siemens, Johnson Controls and many more.
Our partners, typically seasoned in the world of technology over many years, think it’s great. Watching the screen, as the algorithms of ecoBuilding are making the best possible and often surprising decisions in every situation, is like finding yourself behind the wheel of a car that drives all by itself, flawlessly taking you to whatever destination you have chosen. Seeing the reduction in energy consumption, they are amazed at how efficient and economical their existing installations have now become. The improved indoor climate means that facility managers and people who use the buildings share the same enthusiasm.
This should come as no surprise. ecoBuildng comes from the same passion and drive to make buildings more energy efficient, comfortable, and sustainable. The idea was born some 12 years ago in ‘Priva’s attic space’ as the brainchild of Theo Rieswijk. Later, he was joined by Hugo Voerman, another colleague who, as a systems architect, took care of the digitization to the cloud. Today, a full team of data scientists, climate specialists and control technicians continue the work on this ground-breaking innovation. Together they are turning the world of building automation on its head, still with the same passion as when it all began. And that’s a great feeling.
This artikel was written by Frank Visscher and published on Linkedin in Juli 2020
