Pradip Thorat And The Intelligence Hidden In Old Buildings

When Pradip Rohidas Thorat walks into an aging mechanical room, he does not begin with a catalogue of replacements. He studies wiring, field devices, control panels and the habits embedded in the machinery. What still works? What is wasting energy? Where can better logic extend the building’s useful life? In most cases he argues, making an existing building smarter is more sustainable than stripping out its system and starting again.

That instinct has carried Thorat from rural Maharashtra to complex facilities in India, the Middle East, Canada and the United States. Now a senior controls specialist with NRG Controls in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he works in a field that is largely invisible until something goes wrong. Building automation systems connect sensors, controllers and software to regulate heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting and other services. They influence energy bills, indoor air quality and the reliability of places where people study, recover, work and conduct public business.

The stakes are larger than the control room. Buildings account for about 30 per cent of global energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency. Thorat’s response to that scale is grounded in the practical rather than the spectacular: tune the equipment already in place, detect faults earlier, and replace only what has truly become obsolete. It is an engineer’s version of conservation, shaped as much by budgets and maintenance realities as by carbon targets.

For Indian readers, the question is immediate. Rapid urban growth is adding new floor area even as offices, hospitals and public institutions face hotter summers and rising demand for cooling. New construction will matter, but so will the performance of buildings already standing. Thorat’s career bridges those realities: an engineer trained in India, applying global control standards while retaining a distinctly frugal respect for materials, maintenance and public budgets.

His first lessons in purposeful engineering came far from a glass skyline. Mechanical engineering gave that question a wider canvas. Thorat earned his bachelor’s degree from Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University and later a master’s in mechanical design from Savitribai Phule Pune University. Building automation appealed because it brought machinery, control logic and human comfort into one system. Early assignments exposed him to facilities where small errors could carry serious consequences, including the Sidra Medical and Research Centre in Doha and Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport.

The portfolio widened. He worked on the Doha Convention Center and Tower , Princess Nourah University, in Saudi Arabia, a United States veterans’ hospital chiller plant, retail refrigeration systems and an aquarium in Tacoma. Each demanded a different definition of a stable environment. An office can tolerate a modest fluctuation in humidity; an aquarium’s living ecosystem may not. A courthouse cannot casually close for a controls upgrade. A research laboratory requires precision that turns an apparently routine HVAC sequence into part of the scientific infrastructure.

Across more than 400 building-automation designs, by his account, Thorat developed a preference for retrofit work. On five courthouse and institutional projects in California, his designs kept existing field devices, wiring, and panel enclosures in service whenever they remained reliable, and upgraded the supervisory controls around them. The approach can reduce material use, labour and disruption, although Thorat does not claim a single savings percentage across those sites. Conditions vary, and a credible retrofit begins with an audit, not a slogan.

This restraint also shapes his view of artificial intelligence. In buildings, AI is useful when it helps operators notice what ordinary schedules conceal: an air-handling unit drifting from its set point, equipment running in an empty zone, or a fault that wastes energy long before it triggers an alarm. Thorat has written about AI-assisted fault detection and smart automation for commercial retrofits, but he treats the technology as an aid to engineering judgement. Data can reveal a pattern; someone still has to understand the plant, test the diagnosis and decide what to change.

In his ongoing research article, "Designing a Carbon-Ready BACnet Control Architecture," Thorat argues that under new carbon penalty laws, problems in a building's equipment now cost real money. Because the law sets fixed figures for how much carbon each unit of energy produces, turning wasted energy into dollars is simple math. The data needed for this is already stored in the building's control system. He says that showing each equipment problem as a dollar cost makes it easy for building owners to understand. After 2030, problems with heating systems will cost more, because electricity will be counted as cleaner and less carbon-heavy. Once a building goes over its emission limit, the penalties rise quickly. Buildings can track all of this if their control systems record energy use, past performance, and equipment problems in the standard BACnet format. Thorat believes building automation engineers are the right people to lead this work.

Connectivity creates another responsibility. As building systems move from isolated controllers to internet-linked networks, a comfort problem can become a cybersecurity problem. Thorat’s 2024 paper in BACnet International’s Journal of Building Automation examined BACnet Secure Connect, a framework designed to authenticate devices and encrypt communication. In his view, good control design has to look decades ahead: planning for how a system will grow, how it will cope when parts of it fail, and how much environmental burden it will carry over its working life.

Thorat has recently gathered this field knowledge into a book, Building Automation System: Design, Integration and Practice, covering subjects from HVAC fundamentals and sensors to commissioning, cybersecurity, AI and digital twins. The publication reflects the second strand of his career: translating lessons from live projects into methods that other engineers can examine, adapt and challenge. It also closes a circle between the young engineer learning from rural energy systems and the practitioner documenting complex controls for a global profession.

There is a temptation to describe smart buildings as futuristic objects packed with sensors. Thorat’s work suggests a less glamorous and more useful definition. Intelligence begins with attention: to the equipment already installed, to the people who depend on it, and to the cost of unnecessary replacement. His career has crossed continents and increasingly sophisticated systems, yet the governing idea remains close to the agave project in Maharashtra. Engineering earns its value when it extracts more possibilities from what is already at hand.