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After winning a $14m contract at Doha City Centre, Johnson Controls International shows you have to be smart to stay in the game

Johnson Controls International (JCI) announced it had been awarded a two year long contract for the total facilities management of Doha City Centre, with a particular focus on driving down energy consumption and costs.

The company has a huge protfolio of managing similar projects including the particularly high profile Empire State Building, where JCI demonstrated energy savings of over $3m over a three year period.

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Though on a smaller scale, at 2.7ha, Azzam Messaykeh, says the Doha City Centre offers JCI numerous opportunities to exercise its skills. In fact, the company has promised the mall a saving of at least 11% on its utility bill, without any capital investment required from the client.

“We took the client’s utility bill from the last three years, averaged it out and normalised the rate. We committed to saving a minimum of 11%,” said Messaykeh. Even prior to integrating the systems, we wanted to show where the savings would be, hence we carried out a detailed energy audit at the facility.

JCI was keen to ensure the client saw how to operate the building smartly. This involved conducting a demonstration of how many people it would take to maintain a certain area, versus what the savings would be if the systems were fully integrated instead.

“Integration of systems to achieve ‘sustainability is a key aspect of smart buildings. We’ve seen buildings with the right systems in place, but because they are not tuned to achieve sustainability, the buildings do not operate as efficiently,” said Messaykeh.

“It’s not just putting the systems in place, but ensuring they all work in harmony together, so you are able to measure and control what you want for efficient operation.

JCI has been involved in energy-saving, performance-based contracting since 1983 and has implemented more than 2,500 performance contracts with total active guarantees of more than $19b. These projects have saved almost 16 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions or the equivalent of planting more than 3 million acres of pine forest.

“JCI Building Efficiency is not only a cooling company that manufactures the world’s most efficient chillers; it is also a controls company. This gives us the leverage to integrate intelligence with green,” explained Samer Tabbara, regional business manager, energy solutions, Middle East, building efficiency.

“For example we have proprietary control systems that optimise chiller plants for efficient operation. No other company has got this leverage of understanding, both the cooling side and the controls side of buildings.”

As an example, the York Chillers, use the Metasys control system. Chillers are fitted with chiller plant optimisation software and feedback loops that monitor chiller readings and select the most efficient chillers at all times to ensure they are run for the most number of hours.

“Smart is really using technology to enable sustainability, and this is what we do at Johnson Controls,” said Tabbara.

The key to converting to a smart building is a firm understanding of the client’s business model, explained Messaykeh.

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