Museums Victoria in Melbourne attracts approximately 2.5 million visitors each year, and its six locations have recently been upgraded for a more climate-friendly future. The Victorian Government’s Greener Government Buildings program selected global engineering company Siemens to bring state of the art energy and environmental efficiency technology to Melbourne Museum, the World-Heritage listed Royal Exhibition Building (built in 1880), Scienceworks, the Immigration Museum and two storage facilities.

The project comprises of a total upgrade of the building management, lighting, water and cooling systems. The Victorian Government has financed the up-front cost of $A11 million (EUR 7 million). The savings are expected to repay the costs within seven years.

Cloud-based energy and sustainability platform opens up new perspectives

As part of the energy performance contract, Siemens also installed the Navigator energy and sustainability platform, which is based on Siemens’ open industry cloud, MindSphere. Here, valuable information supplied by sensors, actuators and other devices is essential. This software enables intelligent analysis of the massive amounts of data collected and generates key performance indicators in real time. This is the basis for displaying and generating detailed trends, reports and evaluations for utility bill management and CO2 reporting.

The data collected by Museums Victoria’s Navigator platform is sent to Siemens where teams of engineers continually review it to further optimise energy consumption. Navigator allows proven services that used to be the purview of on-site management to be combined with remote services.

Investments in modernisation payback

The success of the modernisation concept is already tangible: CO2 emissions have been reduced by 35 per cent. Siemens anticipates a savings of 4,590 tons of CO2 by the end of the contract term. Water consumption has dropped by six per cent. The utility costs have been reduced by 32 per cent, an amount equivalent to the electricity consumption of 1,264 average households.

Today, operating costs comprise 71 per cent of a building’s total cost of ownership, with approximately 30 per cent of that going toward energy costs. For this reason, investment in comprehensive building technology modernisation makes sense, both in environmental and financial terms, as exemplified by Museums Victoria.