ENERGY MANAGEMENT & OPTIMISATION Digitisation – futureproofing portfolios
With commercial property tenants increasingly expecting sustainable and efficient buildings as standard, the onus is on building owners and facilities professionals to identify areas for optimisation. Yet despite these expectations, and an increasingly stringent legislative landscape around emissions reduction, there is ambiguity around best practice. With this in mind, Cillian Casey, regional vice-president EMEA at CIM, looks at the importance of digitisation strategies in decarbonising property portfolios
T
he need to adopt more sustainable practices continues to dominate the discourse in the commercial property sector. But despite Net Zero targets having been passed into law in 2019,
it can be argued that the conversation has been slow to emphasise the level of urgency required. Considering that property operations account for 28% of global carbon emissions, this situation is disheartening and will require decisive action if carbon emissions are to be reduced in a timely fashion. Complicating matters further is the fact that 80% of buildings that will be standing in 2050 – the UK’s target for Net Zero – have already been built. Consequently, while the need to build new, eco-friendly buildings will always remain prescient, more attention needs to be paid to how existing buildings can be decarbonised.
Decarbonisation drive
But beyond governmental legislation, attention must be paid to other factors driving decarbonisation. For example, a building’s sustainability credentials are increasingly proving a key consideration for tenants, with 42% of RICS’ latest Global Commercial Property Monitor believing that certified green buildings attain a price premium over their comparable non-green counterparts. The idea that tenants will pay more for sustainable structures was further tested and affirmed in a comprehensive analysis of 42 studies on the ‘value of green’ conducted by Dalton and Fuerst. It showed that green certifications for commercial properties yielded an average rent premium of 5.4% and a sales premium of 11.5%. The need to establish sustainable operating models is therefore clear and should be backed up by immediate action. Not only will not implementing strategies increase exposure to future regulatory demands – it could also place organisations at risk of missing opportunities to leverage more reliable and proven mechanisms to swiftly find efficiencies and improve how buildings are run. This includes implementing digital innovations to monitor building performance and suggest optimisations to improve equipment performance. Installing systems to build climate intelligence and capability will undoubtedly become more urgent as increasingly strict legislation is introduced
and adopted. By contrast, failure to futureproof in this manner may result in unnecessary exposure to penalties and added operational expense to be shouldered by unhappy tenants.
Data adoption
Ultimately, adopting data-driven operations to optimise workflow is fundamental to ensuring efficient and sustainable building portfolios. Alongside this, OpEx savings realised from checking and optimising existing equipment and processes can be reallocated to CapEx budgets, supporting a proceeding drive toward electrification and renewables. Yet this virtuous circle is dependent on decisive action now to mitigate the financial impact of inefficient properties. One key area where improvements can quickly be made is in heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems, which can account for 38% of a building’s total energy consumption. Though data can be provided on most HVAC equipment’s performance
through the building management system (BMS), making sense of the information provided and implementing improvement strategies can present further complications. Specifically, it can be hard to make sense of data streams provided through equipment and sensors This is because they could be poorly configured, they may have deviated from desired settings over time, or facility managers and building teams may not be proficient at analysing morasses of data. Subsequently, many property and facilities managers can be classed as data rich, but information poor. It is with this in mind that building analytics tools such as CIM’s PEAK platform come to the fore.
The key appeal of building analytics systems is that they ingest data collected from properties and turn it into real, actionable information that can be used to make faster and better building management decisions. Crucial to this is the advanced fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) algorithms used to continuously monitor available information sources, including data gleaned from IoT sensors, HVAC systems, with weather and people monitoring software, alongside lift, electricity, BMS and NMI feeds. This information can then be used to identify opportunities for greater operational efficiency and faster, well-informed building management decisions. This was recently demonstrated with property developers Kyko Group, which achieved a 32.3% drop in base building energy after deploying a building analytics platform on a 10-story office building. Crucially, this process is entirely automated, meaning emissions can be lowered without on-site technical expertise on HVAC systems within the facilities team.
Integrated approaches
In conclusion, if the commercial property sector is to realise urgent Net Zero ambitions, new tools and approaches are required to facilitate this. First and foremost among these are the informed use of data and analytics. Forming a roadmap to reduced emissions must be based on decisions driven by accurate data, especially in a legislative environment where improvements must increasingly be proven beyond simple gut feelings.
Consequently, by digitising operations across portfolios through the use of data-driven detection and diagnostics software such as CIM’s PEAK platform, stakeholders can take immediate steps toward more efficient and sustainable building performance. Doing so will be invaluable to ensuring organisations do not leave themselves in a precarious situation where rising costs due to inefficiencies could make it harder to implement sustainable practices later down the line.
6 BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER JANUARY 2023 Read the latest at:
www.bsee.co.uk
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