1. General
Category
SDG 7: Affordable and Clean Energy
SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities
SDG 13: Climate Action
Category
Building Materials & Equipment
2. Project Details
Company or Institution
75F
Project
75F IoT Building Management System
General description of the AI solution
In 2008, the United Nations launched a campaign to raise thermostats in their secretariat building from 70 to 75°F as one of many strategies to reduce their carbon emissions. 75F honors the spirit of this initiative in name and in mission.
75F's revolutionary IoT Building Management system uses smart sensors, controls, and machine learning to make commercial buildings more efficient, comfortable, and healthy. It enables out-of-the-box HVAC automation and analytics in commercial spaces of all sizes. With industry-leading energy efficiency standards built into its control algorithms, Project Haystack native API, integrated digital twin, and secure cloud-based operation, 75F delivers unprecedented efficiency, interoperability, and scalability unlike anything else on the building controls market today.
The system uses AI to create a digital twin of any commercial building, merging data from a wireless sensor network and third-party weather forecasts to predictively and proactively redirect airflow where it is needed most via software-defined controllers. This method saves 75F users an average of 41.8% in HVAC energy consumption.
Website
Organisation
75F
3. Aspects
Excellence and Scientific Quality: Please detail the improvements made by the nominee or the nominees’ team or yourself if your applying for the award, and why they have been a success.
75F uses ML to improve the functionality of our entire stack, from hardware to software. The 75F IoT Building Management System (BMS) will mold itself to each building —and its subsequent zones — based on information from real-time sensor data, occupancy trends, occupant preference, and the weather. As time goes by and more data becomes available, 75F's algorithms will be better able to predict hot and cold spots before they occur, thus reducing the energy required to treat problem areas within a building. In the commercial building controls industry, using ML to predict heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) needs is highly innovative, especially when provided in a full-stack solution.
The 75F IoT BMS is fully commercialized. 75F presently sells its solution in The Americas, the Middle East, and the Asia/Pacific region via office locations in the U.S., India, and Singapore.
As public interest in the intersection of AI, ML and green technology has increased, so has public exposure to 75F's technology. 75F recently entered a partnership with global HVAC leader, Daikin Applied, to design and deploy a new generation of wireless controls and sensing technology, and market leader in smart solutions, Siemens AG, invested in 75F this year, joining other investor groups like Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy and Steve Case's Rise of the Rest. Within the last year, 75F's system has earned recognition from Google Accelerator for Startups, the Global Cleantech 100, BloombergNEF Pioneers, the Clean Fight New York, and Frost & Sullivan.
Scaling of impact to SDGs: Please detail how many citizens/communities and/or researchers/businesses this has had or can have a positive impact on, including particular groups where applicable and to what extent.
Buildings are the fourth-leading contributor to greenhouse gas emissions globally, and roughly half of a commercial building's energy use stems from HVAC. Efficiency is a vital pathway to cutting carbon emissions in this sector, and building controls are a well-known strategy to reduce energy waste. However, most building control systems today function on rigid technology developed in the 1980s and 90s, making them labor-intensive and expensive. Due to these limitations, the vast majority of the global building stock do not have a control system in place.
75F represents a new class of IoT-native BMS offerings that leverage the power of the cloud and ML to make building automation both more effective at the core and more accessible to everyone. The technology achieves this by bypassing the limitations of traditional systems, such as time-consuming installations, configuration, wiring, troubleshooting, and integration. 75F's innovative solution leverages an IoT-based architecture that continuously delivers updates and enhanced AI algorithms over the air. While local control remains onsite, the cloud allows for almost infinite data storage for advanced analytics and ML for optimization. Where traditional controls typically exist in buildings larger than 250,000 square feet, 75F is particularly accessible to small and mid-sized buildings, which are the most common building types.
Scaling of AI solution: Please detail what proof of concept or implementations can you show now in terms of its efficacy and how the solution can be scaled to provide a global impact ad how realistic that scaling is.
75F's evidence for impact stems from real-world installations and third-party studies that demonstrate scalable energy savings across building age and type.
Third-party studies from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Gas Technology Institute (GTI) validate HVAC energy savings of 30-50%. GTI’s studies in the Midwest and California were based on real-world deployments with blind A/B testing. NREL’s study quantified savings by modeling 75F’s applications against 14 Department of Energy building types across 857 climate zones and three utility structures, resulting in over 100,000 unique model runs.
In real-world applications, the average 75F user will see an average of 41.8% HVAC energy savings.
Ethical aspect: Please detail the way the solution addresses any of the main ethical aspects, including trustworthiness, bias, gender issues, etc.
The 75F IoT BMS makes automation accessible to more buildings than any other solution available on the market today. Where the industry-standard solutions of today are cost prohibitive to small business owners or mid- to small-sized facilities, 75F leverages ML and IoT to break down cost and implementation barriers. This is especially important for minorities, who are disproportionately affected by cost limitations.