Tech Briefs Magazine - February 2023 - ST12

Lighting the Way to Sustainability with PoE
A
ccording to the U.S. Department of
Energy, commercial buildings are responsible
for roughly 18 percent of the
total energy consumed in this country. So,
reducing energy consumption, building by
building, could have a big impact.
It's a safe assumption that a lot of that
power is needlessly wasted. For example,
during the pandemic shut-down the reduction
in energy used in commercial
buildings in New York City was significantly
less than the drop in occupancy
for those buildings.
That fact supports my opinion that
intelligent control of building systems
could go a long way toward improving
energy efficiency.
To check out the possibilities, I had a
discussion with Akram Khalis, CTO of
MHT Lighting, Inc., Staten Island, NY,
about their lighting control system, which
is built on Power over Ethernet (PoE). The
unique feature of a PoE network is that
with a single low voltage cable, you can
power the lighting, control it, and harvest
detailed information about patterns of use.
And you can also use it to coordinate with
other building systems, like HVAC and
powered window coverings.
PoE allows a single twisted pair
Ethernet cable to provide both data and
electrical power. Sensors, cameras, and
access points have been using PoE
power for some time now, but lighting
has been largely overlooked. The switch
to low-power LEDs for general lighting,
however, has made it reasonable to use
PoE as a power source for lighting.
With lighting, you already have a network
in place throughout the entire building.
So, if the lighting is powered by PoE,
you can add sensors to the lighting fixtures
and capture an extremely granular and
detailed picture of the living building. By
exporting data from those sensors over
Ethernet, you could accumulate information
like average temperature, average humidity,
average light level per area, and
room occupancy rates.
" I can't find an access point that's not
PoE, but we never pay attention to the very
high-density equipment in the building,
which is lighting - it's in every office, in
every room, in every square foot. It's the
way to illuminate the building, " said Khalis.
The MHT system can source up to 90
watts, the biggest portion of which can
power the LEDs - at typically 10 watts per
lamp. The remaining power can be used
for sensors. And that's where the utility of
PoE lighting systems shines.
Energy Efficiency via Sensing and
Control
There are two main ways an automated
building system can reduce energy usage:
* Different systems can be coordinated to
automatically reduce energy, for example
lighting and HVAC.
* Distributed sensors can gather information
about building conditions and by
means of a dashboard, generate reports
of kWh versus time, as the conditions
vary. This can provide critical information
indicating what contributes to increased
energy consumption.
With MHT's Inspextor® software platform,
you can plan coordinated actions
to reduce a building's energy usage. The
platform can track kWh usage and correlate
that with events in the building,
such as which rooms are occupied at
certain times. So, for example, meetings
could be rescheduled to reduce peak
energy demand.
MHT's AI engine can convert raw data
into meaningful information and send it
back to a human being via a dashboard
reporting mechanism.
You can use the platform to create goals
for energy savings and then guide you to
implementing them, rather than working
backwards by shutting lights and turning
down HVAC to measure their effects.
With Inspextor, you can predefine your
goal, say to reduce consumption by 5-10%,
save that goal and with the dashboard feature,
see the numbers change statistically.
The dashboard can display actual consumption;
project what would happen over
time to consumption if you didn't do anything;
and what could be achieved by following
a suggested plan.
The information can be used in two different
ways.
Figure 1. PoE injector. (Image: Vladimir Zhupanenko/
Shutterstock)
12
Figure 2. Inspextor's PoE software can provide real-time data on a variety of sensor inputs hourly,
daily, weekly, monthly, and more for an understanding of short-term and long-term trends. (Image:
MHT Lighting)
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