Operating Cost

Verne Global's data center has performed more efficiently than initial expectations, thanks to the capacity and cost savings resulting from a free cooling system based on technology from Eaton-Williams, an affiliate of CES Group, LLC. Located in Keflavik, Iceland, the facility is the world’s first zero-carbon, 100% renewably powered data center. The center utilizes an innovative free cooling system that takes advantage of the moderate Icelandic climate and taps into the island’s vast geothermal and hydroelectric resources.

A multi-tenant biomedical research and laboratory building is poised to become a powerful economic driver in El Paso, Texas, thanks to an innovative public-private partnership between the Medical Center of the Americas (MCA) Foundation, the City of El Paso, and a diverse group of investors and committed tenants. Construction has not yet begun on the building, called the Cardwell Collaborative, but key stakeholders—such as the city’s public health department, Texas Tech University, and the University of Texas at El Paso—have already snapped up master leases.

Boston Medical Center has implemented new mobile facility management applications from Magic Software Enterprises. BMC's new iOS and Android apps are part of the End-to-End Enterprise Mobility Solution and increase the efficiency of hospital technicians who repair equipment across the large campus. The apps enable the immediate rerouting of employees to respond to critical malfunctions as they happen and also allow hospital staff to initiate and monitor service calls and check on the status of incidents at any time.

The key to fully leveraging a building automation system (BAS) in animal research facilities is to put all of the information about the animals’ environment at staff’s literal fingertips with tablet computing. Additionally, a few simple upgrades—some derived from unlikely sources—can help reduce costs associated with controlling two of the industry’s primary concerns: ammonia detection and airflow.

How many facilities management and corporate real estate editorials and articles have been written over the past five years championing the cause that facilities management and corporate real estate need seats in the C-suite Club? Many, but probably about the same number written in any five-year period since the 1970s, when facilities management and corporate real estate began to emerge as unique business functions. It’s an old lament.

An evidence-based approach to designing and analyzing research laboratories—one that focuses on practical and interrelated reductions in energy use—offers long-term cost benefits that trump popular but often-underperforming symbolic gestures. Traditional thinking suggests that sustainable construction of research labs, which are among the most energy-intensive facilities in the world, costs many times more than the non-green alternative. Not so, say the designers at Payette, a Boston architectural firm.

The biggest factor in determining or predicting appropriate facilities management staffing levels is not the amount or type of space managed, but the size and type of the workforce served. This revelation, which contradicts widespread thought and practice, came to light in a new study of how facility management staffing models have changed over the past 10 years—a period that includes the Great Recession of 2008.

Efficiently capturing facility management data about a new building or recently installed equipment saves time and money for the plant operations team after construction is completed. The process begins with selecting the most appropriate model for collecting the information and properly integrating it into the facility management system at the inception of a project. Building information modeling (BIM) is a critical component in data collection.

Onset announced the release of a new high-performance data logger for building performance monitoring applications in January of 2014. The HOBO UX120-006M Analog Logger provides twice the accuracy of previous models, a deployment-friendly LCD, and support for up to four external sensors for measuring temperature, current, CO2, voltage, and more. This enables energy engineers, facility managers, and others to easily solve a range of building performance applications, including energy audits, building commissioning studies, and equipment scheduling optimization.

Lease arrangements for office and laboratory space have historically been mostly for smaller companies, but are now becoming increasingly popular as a way for large research institutions to find an entrée into or expand in congested and expensive urban centers quickly, cost-effectively, and with more flexibility than building new.

The following is a compilation of responses to a survey that asked individuals responsible for planning, design, operations, and maintenance of high-containment facilities to rank their priorities for 2014 and make open-ended comments regarding those priorities. The issues identified in this survey will be the focus of Tradeline’s upcoming conference—The 2014 International Conference on Biocontainment Facilities—on April 10‐11 in Scottsdale, Arizona.

The respondents ranked their overall priorities as follows:

A new approach to space planning based on Lean design concepts improves space utilization processes and helps reduce building and operating expenses for academic, research, and healthcare facilities by achieving maximum efficiency with minimum construction.

The University of Sussex has initiated a $246 million service delivery contract with Interserve. Over the ten-year partnership, Interserve will provide services including building management, capital projects development, grounds maintenance, cleaning, postal services, parking, security, waste management, and infrastructure improvements. Interserve will aim to deliver best-practice processes to improve operational efficiency. The University of Sussex has five campuses in the United Kingdom, three of which are in Brighton.

Eastern Kentucky University's utility costs have remained stable over the last two years due to the implementation five years ago of an Energy Savings Performance Contract (ESPC) with Siemens Building Technologies. Aiming to generate savings and address deferred maintenance needs, the $27 million contract included extensive infrastructure upgrades to HVAC, lighting, and water systems, as well as the integration of building automation technologies.

The following is a condensed transcript of a panel discussion from Tradeline’s 2013 International Conference on Research Facilities. The panelists are William Gustafson, principal at Ballinger; Steven Frei, principal at Affiliated Engineers, and Michael Reagan, vice president of Stantec. The moderator is Steve Westfall, founder and CEO of Tradeline.