Adelaide Airport

CIM & Adelaide Airport were announced as finalists in The SA Climate Leaders Awards which celebrates leaders in climate action.

Adelaide Airport had a goal - to become one of the most sustainable airports in the world. By partnering with CIM to deploy smart building analytics, it is well on its way to achieving that.

Outside air temperature is the biggest influence on how much energy the Terminal 1 building consumes. The volume of passengers flowing through each day only influences consumption by 19%, as opposed to 81% for outside air temperature.

Knowing the airport’s building stock has this level of influence placed on it from climatic factors, the prospect of warmer summers brings with it the need to mitigate increases in greenhouse gas emissions from our building stock.

Partnering with CIM allows Adelaide Airport to optimise the operation of its major emission-emitting assets beyond a level that our existing technologies can offer.

This is helping it to adapt to the impacts of climate change in three ways – emissions reduction, peak demand management and asset life cycle perspective.

The project started in February 2018 and the airport is already on track to deliver savings of 600tCO2e and 933MWh, for a 7-month payback, demonstrating the benefits of big industry collaborating with emerging innovations that deliver more for less.

Innovative approach to solving the problem

Heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) consumes the majority of energy in a building yet has historically had less optimisation attention due its complexity.

Without analytics, HVAC optimisation is constrained to consultants providing optimisation recommendations and the existing building management system (BMS) identifying primitive faults. This leaves a gap in the emissions reduction potential from HVAC in buildings that cannot be serviced through existing offerings.

The optimisation of Adelaide Airports HVAC and its onsite team’s activity is being conducted by CIM’s PEAK Platform.

The most complex of faults that are contributing to higher emissions are now being identified in real-time.

Teams are being notified of where to go and how to fix them as they occur. Live emissions saving potential is now being ranked across the terminal, allowing maintenance activity to be prioritised and directed based on maximum emissions reduction. The condition and expected lifecycle of the equipment has now been improved, allowing it to deal with more >40°C days, as they occur through climate change.

A longer-term sustainable outcome

PEAK's building analytics provides an attractive value proposition, in that it doesn’t just deliver one-time recommendations and then steps back. Since partnering with CIM, Adelaide Airport was ranked #1 airport in the world Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark. They're also the first Australian airport to achieve Level 3 Optimisation under the Airports Council International's Carbon Accreditation Program and they received a Platinum award for waste reduction in the Airport Council International – Asia Pacific Green Airports Recognition 2018. For the next 3-years PEAK will be continually scanning Terminal 1 for performance anomalies, instantly detecting, diagnosing and prioritising live faults for onsite teams to fix. This means emissions saving opportunities can be achieved within days, not months.