From doorbells with cameras to smoke detectors that send alerts to your smartphone, the smart home technology market is big business. Smart home tech companies such as Nest and Vivint are churning out an ever growing array of smartphone-controlled devices like thermostats, cameras, light bulbs and security systems, all designed to give homeowners more control of their living space. According to a report from Berg Insight, North America has the highest number of installed smart home systems, with 12.7m smart homes at the end of 2015. This could soon grow to 46.2m smart homes by 2020 – around 35% of households in North America.
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But it’s not just eco-conscious homeowners who are catching on. Smart building technology is making its way into commercial spaces as well. Today, the manager of a smart building can rely on an automated intelligent building management system to ensure that the building’s lighting, heating and air conditioning system are working together for optimal energy efficiency. Lights can be programmed to turn off when rooms are unoccupied. And if changes need to be made, they can easily be made from a tablet or smartphone.
The smart building tech industry has expanded significantly in recent years, thanks to both environmental and economic concerns – this tech often produces energy cost savings – and regulatory changes designed to encourage energy efficiency.
And, when it comes to saving energy, windows play a key role. According to the US Green Building Council (USGBC), the principle loss of energy in buildings is through windows. A pane of glass can lose or gain up to 10 times the amount of heat than a same sized wall space.
Enter the smart window market. In a reportpublished last December, market research firm N-tech Research predicted that the current market for smart windows, which sits at $40m, will grow to nearly $500m by 2019.
“Smart windows are part of a broader story of how technology is enabling better user interface with [a] building,” says Benjamin Freas, an analyst at Navigant Research who covers the smart building sector. “Previously, if the sun was in your eyes, you would have needed to get up out of your chair, go to the shade, draw it down, maybe raise it again later in the day. Now, that’s not necessary.”
Several years ago, the W Hotel in San Francisco replaced conventional windows in the lobby space with smart windows made by View, a smart glass company based in Milpitas, California. On sunny days, the windows in the hotel automatically tint to block heat and glare; on overcast days, the tint adjusts to a lesser level.
View says its glass reduces electricity consumption by an average of 20%. This is a chart of View windows installed in various cities in the US. Photograph: View
View is one of two dominant players in the smart window industry. The other is Minnesota-based Sage Glass, which was founded in 1989 and purchased by the French building materials company Saint-Gobain in 2012. Both companies’ windows rely on electrochromic technology, in which the glass is coated with nano-layers of metal oxides (the companies differ slightly in the coatings they apply). When sunlight hits the coated glass, the ions move between the different layers, changing the structure and tint of the glass. Once installed, the windows’ tint is controlled by smartphone or tablet.
“The algorithm is going to be dependent on the time of year, the latitude and longitude of the building and what the weather is doing,” explains Dr Brandon Tinianov, the vice president of business development at View. “But I also know how far away from the window your workstation will be and how the sunlight will hit your screen at different times of day and year. And I can have an office that’s lighter and, right next to it, one that’s darker.”
And then there are the energy savings. Over the lifetime of the windows, View estimates that the windows can reduce energy expenditures by up to 20%. There’s also a small, but growing, body of evidence that suggests that the biological effects of increased exposure to natural light can have big economic payoffs, for everyone from office workers and students to hospital patients. View conservatively estimates that the windows can increase worker productivity by up to 2%.
The technology doesn’t come cheap – View’s windows cost approximately 50% more than a traditional window, according to Rao Mulpiri, View’s CEO, but they provide cost savings elsewhere in the construction budget. The windows eliminate the need for blinds and curtains, for example, and their heat-blocking abilities allow for smaller air conditioning units (which can free up more useable space within the building).
View has scored a number of high profile contracts in recent years, and, last summer, raised $150m in funding to further expand their production capabilities, on top of the $350m in funding the company had raised in previous rounds.
View’s glass installed at the Methodist Olive Branch Hospital in Memphis. The hospital saved $22,000 after installing the windows, and saves $2,000 annually in energy costs. Photograph: View
Today, View’s windows have been installed in more than 200 buildings, including hospitals, schools, large commercial office buildings and public buildings. Earlier this year, View announced it had won a contract to install 100,000 sq feet of windows at the USAA Real Estate Company’s America Center II, its biggest contract yet.
Lorie Pella is the director of project planning at Humber River Hospital, a 1.8m-sq foot hospital built in Toronto that opened in 2015 with aggressive sustainability goals. The original plans for the hospital called for windows with integral blinds, but Pella and his team had concerns about maintenance. “The problem with those is that they have a high rate of breakdown,” Pella says. “And then fixing them is more problematic, because the blind is encased in glass. It’s a big maintenance issue to continue to repair them.”
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So when the design and construction teams proposed smart windows, Pella was intrigued. Humber River Hospital opened with 28,000 sq feet of View windows, and Pella says the windows are popular with patients, who can control tint from their hospital beds, and seem to reduce heat load. “The cost over time made sense,” Pella says. “We didn’t have to buy a thousand window blinds, and have to replace them over a 30-year period and constantly maintain them.”
Some organizations are worried about risk. Humber River Hospital, for example, which had concerns about whether the tinted windows would provide enough privacy for patients, ordered a test piece of glass and created a window mockup, which they tested under various lighting conditions, at different times of day, before deciding on the windows.
“There’s a certain amount of inertia with these buildings,” says Freas. “The people who have been installing windows for a long time, they’re reluctant to take on a new risk.”
