With a vision of providing sustainable cooling for buildings, the world’s largest pump manufacturer, Grundfos partnered with NP’s Environmental & Water Technology Centre of Innovation or EWTCOI (now known as Centre for Environmental Sustainability-CfES) in 2016 to bring this ambitious idea to fruition.

It took two years of research and trials with a series of simulation studies and pilots. Through these trials, it was discovered that the DPS can be retrofitted into commercial buildings with existing central air-conditioning and can reduce the cooling energy cost for centrally cooled buildings by up to 20 percent. While conventional cooling systems often use up a high level of energy regardless of fluctuating cooling demands, NP and Grundfos managed to develop this first of its kind system worldwide, capable of operating at optimal conditions all the time.

Thanks to this breakthrough discovery, NP has also retrofitted its buildings on campus with the DPS, as part of our green campus initiatives and have successfully achieved greater energy efficiencies, while still maintaining a cool, comfortable environment.

The DPS is now being widely used not just in Singapore, but regionally across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Japan and Taiwan as well.

     

Did you know that NP is the first polytechnic to install solar panels to generate clean energy as part of the SolarNova programme led by the Economic Development Board and Housing & Development Board?

Funded by the National Clean Energy Research Programme, NP’s Solar Technology Centre was installed with five types of solar panels to evaluate the performance and characteristics of different solar photovoltaic modules under tropical weather conditions, such as rainfall, relative humidity, ambient temperature and irradiance of sunlight.

As pioneers of experimenting with solar panels, today we have over 4,000 solar panels installed on more than half of the rooftops of our buildings. Today, we have over 4,000 solar panels on the rooftops of more than half of our buildings on campus. The renewable energy generated accounts for about seven percent of our energy usage and has contributed in part to the cut in our carbon footprint.

Since it was first set up in 2019, NP’s Integrated Operations Centre (IOC), has taken huge leaps forward in increasing the efficiency of campus operations by tracking in real-time the polytechnic’s energy and water usage. The heart of the IOC is the collection of data from hundreds of smart cameras and sensors throughout campus, displayed, in real time, on screens that form a video wall. Predictive analytics software monitors operations and forecasts potential equipment failures and outages. Key personnel can be alerted at any time with the placement of communication systems. The IOC incorporates surveillance, security, and smart access through frontier technology and the integration of an entire network into one system.

In 2021, NP’s innovative proposal to integrate its campus facilities using the IOC received a $1 million grant from the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) to lead the way in adopting smart technologies including cloud-based systems powered by Internet of Things applications and Artificial Intelligence, as well as digital twin models. In doing so, operational procedures have been streamlined, leading to improved overall performance and efficiency. We have also built the capabilities of the security management and the facility management teams.

Today, NP is top ranked in its energy performance based on its low energy use intensity (EUI) among institutions in the Polytechnic and ITE category.

(Source: BCA’s Benchmarking Report released in July 2023)