Spie Europe

With their new headquarters, SPIE wanted to create an architectural showpiece for the technological standards of the future. SPIE’s management imparted this goal to every party involved in order inspire top performance. The project was a difficult challenge for the Kieback&Peter Paris team, which needed to plan and implement the entire building automation for the four-story headquarters with around 10,000 square meters of floor space. A total of 400 employees needed to be able to work here comfortably at every time of day and in every season. The smart building technology with individual controllers also needed to contribute to this goal. For Kieback&Peter, this meant combining heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting into a unified, modern, resource-efficient system. In order to achieve maximum efficiency, the head of the Paris subsidiary, Nicolaus Krauze, and his team of specialists needed to install Kieback&Peter’s most innovative solutions. They also needed to integrate a third party’s complex geothermal system into the digital system. For the Kieback&Peter Paris team, this was their most challenging project to date.

“We spent a lot of time at the construction site” – for Nicolas Krauze, head of the Kieback&Peter Paris subsidiary, this was the key to successfully completing the major project on time and within budget. Being on location allowed the engineers at Kieback&Peter to continually discuss the details of the project in person with the contractors at SPIE. The planning and installation phase lasted more than a year. The result: Kieback&Peter implemented building automation that meets all requirements – and furthermore, is also easy to use.

The powerful Neutrino BMS 7000 building management system is at the heart of Kieback&Peter’s automation solution. The central control and monitoring software runs on a server in the SPIE headquarters’ equipment room and communicates with all the building services via cabling/IP. Thanks to the intuitive and easy-to-understand graphic user interface on the PC screen, facility managers can easily see all of the parameters of all plant components and adjust them as needed. If any of the components experience a malfunction, for example, a pump in the heating circuit, the Neutrino BMS automatically sends the standby service a text message. Quick reaction times ensure a high level of reliability. Furthermore, remote access via a PC with a secure Internet connection makes it possible to rectify smaller malfunctions immediately and from anywhere.

The information centers are switched between the Neutrino BMS software in the equipment room and the system’s field devices. They are located in five electrical cabinets. This is where Kieback&Peter’s powerful, flexible DDC4200 controllers work. They communicate with the Neutrino BMS, with each other and with field devices located at approximately 5,000 physical data points. The field devices are distributed throughout the entire building and take care of the “actual work” on location. The sensors, such as temperature sensors in the heating system, continuously record data and send it to the DDC automation stations. The actuators, such as damper actuators in the ventilation system, execute control commands from the DDCs.

The particularly resource-efficient use of energy in the SPIE headquarters is based on two pillars: On the one hand, geothermal energy is used as a renewable primary energy source for the building. Groundwater from 60 geothermal probes located 99 meters underground heat or cool the floors as needed.  On the other hand, the building automation from Kieback&Peter ensures that all of the integrated systems work properly while using as little energy as possible. For example, the digital system controls the pumps in the geothermal system so that they only consume energy when heat or cooling is required.

The Kieback&Peter system also contributes to the comfort of the SPIE employees: They can control the lighting, heating and air-conditioning easily and quickly. Sustainable energy use plus intelligent building automation result in a level of comfort that every employee and visitor can enjoy.