Chiller systems can consume as much as 40% of your building’s total energy costs. With outside temperatures rising in many parts of the world, it’s no surprise that many building owners and operators are now thinking about chiller optimization. What isn’t appealing about reducing your chiller systems’ downtime by as much as 50%, lowering your system energy costs by up to 20% and benefiting from a lower cost of ownership? Unless you like wasting money and greenhouse gas emissions on your chiller solutions, the answer is – nothing.

And the great news for any company prioritizing more efficient buildings is that Johnson Controls is the go-to company for industry leading technology and services for chiller optimization services. Evidenced by us being awarded us the Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Customer Value Leadership Award for 2022.

The award, focused on the North America region but reflective of the company’s global offer, recognizes how Johnson Controls OpenBlue Services for Chillers is taking chiller optimization to new levels of efficiency, reliability and operational performance. Frost & Sullivan’s research shows how OpenBlue is the most popular AI-enhanced buildings management system on the market today. In particular, the report recognizes Johnson Controls’ performance in areas such as:

• Operational efficiency
• Price/performance value
• Focus on energy savings and sustainability
• Customer service and adaption based on continual customer feedback cycle
• Enhancing customers’ experience/abilities through continual improvement

Frost & Sullivan’s report is a compelling read for anyone looking to source a state-of-the-art chiller system or to upgrade an existing deployment with data connectivity and advanced features. It notes the maturity of the Johnson Controls solution which is now operational in thousands of buildings. Each system being sensor-equipped and generating data in real-time allowing micro-management of all functions in real-time 24/7.

One client, a major medical provider running hospitals deployed 100 connected chillers and saw operational and energy savings of over $200,000 over a period of just three months. By connecting the hospitals’ chillers, Johnson Controls OpenBlue system identified energy surges before they could damage critical motors, enabled swift compressor replacement before predicted failure, and protected chillers in general from failures in the existing building management system (BMS).

And this is only one example with a single deployment; by working with Johnson Controls, our chiller services will soon enable our customers with an even greater ability to benefit from aggregated data insights.

As it stands today, 5,000 Gb of operational buildings data is flowing into Johnson Controls systems from our customers’ deployments each day. Our total data lake, for buildings specifically, stands at 11,000,000 Gb. This represents a pool of rich insights from which we can build predictive engineering models – or digital twins. These digital twins give us an ability to automatically benchmark any number of devices’ real-time performance – in minute detail - against agreed targets such as vibration tolerance and energy use. We can see where and when performance starts to decline and increasingly optimize the system over time or take proactive maintenance action.

As we say: Where-ever you find advanced buildings, you’ll find Johnson Controls, and our work on chiller optimization and digital twins is a great example.

Advantages of the Johnson Controls OpenBlue Services for Chillers:

• A real-time performance view highlights faults and finds optimization opportunities faster than non-connected systems reliant on periodic manual checks.
• Knowledge received from connected chiller deployments can be enhanced by anonymous data from other systems Johnson Controls is managing.
• Insights from anonymous aggregated data allows customers to assess their chiller performance against other similar deployments in real-time by using digital twins.
• Chiller system data can be mixed with data from other connected systems to create a single pane of glass view of a buildings campus’ whole operational state.
• Security is provided through ISA Secure standard accreditation with the ability to go further through the adoption of new zero-trust capability.
  The net result is lowered energy use (CO2e savings), reduced downtime, and lower cost of ownership.

To see Frost & Sullivan’s independent analysis of Johnson Controls OpenBlue Services for Chillers, read Smart Connected Chillers Market Excellence in Best Practices report.