10%-15% reduction in building emissions can be significant for society: Vijay Sankaran, CTO of Johnson Controls

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Decarbonisation of buildings is a key imperative to achieve the national net-zero goals, as buildings contribute nearly 40% of global emissions. In a conversation with ET Digital, Vijay Sankaran, vice-president and chief technology officer at Johnson Controls, says climate change is the most urgent challenge of our time and the answer to that lies in systemic digitalisation of buildings as well as using cloud, edge and AI to unite, automate and optimise systems.

Edited excerpts:Economic Times (ET): Sustainability is in focus nowadays. How important is sustainability when it comes to building spaces or maybe even large factories, and what does Johnson Controls control have to offer as solutions?Vijay Sankaran (VS): Ultimately, buildings comprise 40% of all global emissions.

So, even to take out 10% or 15% out of the emissions is significant for society. Johnson Controls has been in business for 140 years, and has always focussed on the building space — building equipment, building control systems….

So, we are uniquely positioned with our OpenBlue platform to take all the data from within the building, bring it up into the cloud in a secure and standardised way and then apply AI and machine learning. We then help create recommendations that can autonomously optimise the building space.

For example, using closed loop control, we can tell when a space is being underutilised, and subsequently we can increase the temperature slightly in that space or we can optimise the fan speeds or we can turn off the lights so that we can reduce the energy consumption, thereby reducing the net-zero carbon output as well. We have a technology solution called Net Zero Advisor platform that guides companies and other entities to meet