April 2021 Digest & Recording

Hey friends, happy Friday!

Welcome to another digest… a collection of highlights from April 2021 that you shouldn’t miss. This is designed to save you time and allow you to catch up on the whole month. Then you can dive deeper whereever you’d like.

Enjoy.

1—Member Gathering Recording on IAQ

Here’s the recording from this week’s Member Gathering. Aaron Lapsley presented a unique framework for how he’s thinking about the IAQ landscape. I think Aaron crushed it and I loved the Q&A with all of you.

My top 3 takeaways:

1. I love the framework for how IAQ-related tech creates value:

1. I can use this ^ to create categories in the Nexus Vendor Landscape
2. “If you want to reduce (pathogen) risk, don’t prioritize AHUs”—some great case study slides backing this up

Comment here with yours!

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2—Deep Dives from March

In case you missed it, members received one deeper dive this month:

• The Lens: 24/7 Carbon Free, Grid Interoperability, Blocpower—the strategy behind the news in as few bullet points as possible… climate change edition.

My top 3 takeaways:

1. Building owners will soon be looking to match clean hourly supply with demand for power. In our terminology, I think that means increasing demand for advanced supervisory control technology. And Google is building their own “platform” that they intend to sell to others.
2. To my knowledge, when we buildings folks talk about behind-the-meter building system interoperability, we’re missing the key concept at the heart of NIST’s framework: Combine existing standards and information models into testable and certifiable profiles.
3. Blocpower’s innovative project development methods can and should make their way into other types of building types and owner profiles to spur tech adoption.

Comment here with yours!

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3—Member Conversations

This month, there have also been some fascinating LinkedIn and Connect conversations, in case you missed any of them:

• Active Efficiency = Grid-interactive efficient buildings via Mike Barker
• Smart Building Specialist Job Description via Jacinda Lofland
• Integrating energy usage data via Mike Bendewald

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4—My top podcast moments this month

John Petze on The Shiny Object Problem:

We had spinning fans that was, you know. Bitmap was first with data that would change… 74.2. Then the fan spins. Now it's 3d. Now it shaded from a 45 degree perspective, right?

What value have we increased? Right? We've increased the sales value, Wiz bang sizzle. But I would argue, in some cases we've diverted our tension intellectual focus away from what matters, which is good, sophisticated control and control sequences. Right?

And so that was the point I was making about, you know, the graphics being the tail that wagged the dog, and then development companies who are building these products would end up putting more engineers on the next version of a graphics package than on doing more control algorithms that would run better.

See the full clips here and add your reaction.

Leon Wurfel on why centralized O&M is inevitable:

There's a tipping point of scale at where it's just like, it's not even like a business case anymore. It's like an IQ test as to whether you've got that different operational model in place.

But I think what the technology is doing is. Lowering that barrier to entry that cross site, that tip over point about we're having a centralized operational model makes sense.

See the full clips here and add your reaction.

Arie Barendrecht on the dumb buildings become irrelevant (my words):

And of course COVID has served us this in a once in a lifetime trend accelerator, beyond our wildest imaginations. And what that means in real estate is that, we believe there's going to be this kind of bifurcated or polarized market, which will be underpinned by a flight to quality of tenants.

So we're moving to a situation quickly, you know—New York city now has 17% vacancy in commercial real estate, for example—where tenants have the power of choice, and tenants are going to. move to buildings where the building owner takes a real responsibility on providing fantastic experiences to their occupants.

See the full clips here and add your reaction.

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5—SME Workshops featuring… you!

In this past cohort of the Nexus Foundations course, we hosted several subject matter expert workshops. These were deep-dive presentations on specific topics: analytics 101, developing use cases, sustaining the business case, base building networks, and more.

These SMEs had so much fun teaching these workshops that I’d like to open this up to all of you. We’ll host one SME workshop per month and the video archive will be available to all Pro members on Connect.

Do you have a topic that you’d like to teach to the wider Nexus community? Hit reply and let me know.

Thanks for reading and thanks for being a Nexus Pro member. As always, I’d love if you hit reply and let me know how I can improve your membership.

—James

P.S. for all of you new members, here are some handy links:

• Anonymous member feedback form (constructive criticism is always appreciated!)
• Modify your account (E.g. change your email address, modify your plan from monthly to annual, etc)
• Submit your podcast interview idea
• Submit your friendly rant podcast idea
• Add your personal Nexus Pro podcast feed to the player of your choice (so your phone automatically downloads members-only podcasts)
• The Nexus Vendor Landscape
• The Archive (all posts with a 🔒 are for members only)
• Add your project to the Nexus Labs consulting waitlist