WASHINGTON, DC-When the General Services Administration received $5.5 billion under the stimulus bill of 2009, much of the focus was the overhaul of federal buildings. However only a small portion--approximately $750 million--of the $5.5 billion went to renovating and constructing federal buildings and courthouses. The majority of it, or $4.5 billion, was dedicated to converting federal properties to high-performance green buildings.

The federal government is well on its way to realizing this goal, panelists at the Building Owners and Managers Association International’s conference said Monday. At the same time, these various projects are also delivering an added bonus: new data, often on a building-by-building level, of energy and operations performance. The information has become so granular that Mark Ewing, facilities manager with the GSA’s Public Building Service, told his audience that he can recognize a particular building by its energy usage patterns--without having to look at the specific address. “We are in a position to begin sub metering and charging tenants for their utilities,” Ewing said. The next phase of its scheme, in fact, is to encourage more engagement by tenants with energy savings now that the right tools are in place, he added.

Getting to this point took some foresight, including recognizing the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the $5.5 billion stimulus presented, said Larry Melton, also a facilities manager with the Public Building Service. “We knew we had to get [the Smart Building concept] embedded in the process right away,” Melton said. “Budgets would inevitability get tighter, as they have. But if we established the groundwork now, we knew we could build on it for years afterwards.”

The goal, in a nutshell, was to both make sure that any new buildings developed for the federal government were built to smart building standards, and to phase as many existing buildings as possible into this network. In theory, the systems in every building under the federal government will be connected to a local area network. Once that is in place, the buildings are then interconnected and the data from the systems aggregated and stored in one place.

In reality this was not as easy as it sounds, of course, Melton said. Some buildings are older than others, with differing systems and high-tech capabilities. The government, though, has implemented these capabilities in at least 50 buildings, capturing and making use of the data, he says. Some of the initial benefits are that regional offices have the tools to better source utilities and other supplies as well as operate more efficiently. When the entire network of government buildings is in the system, he said, the government will have at its disposal enough data to reshape how it operates.