RBS has selected EnergyDeck as a finalist in the Innovation Gateway; a major international search for new ways of reducing energy, water and waste.

Launched in March this year, the RBS Innovation Gateway attracted more than 140 submissions in just 40 days, from brand new concepts through to market-ready products and services.

The ideas came from innovators and small businesses (SMEs) around Britain and the world, from Perth in Scotland to Perth in Western Australia. The best ideas will be tested on the RBS estate of 2,500 buildings and branches in the UK.

Photo by Mack Male, CC BY-SA

We’ve all heard the horror stories about some of the highest rated LEED and BREEAM buildings being some of the worst culprits in terms of actual, operational energy and resource consumption (measured typically in kWh / m2, and several other metrics, provided there is enough data available). When the designers of such buildings are asked why their models differ so dramatically from reality, the answer is almost always the same: the building isn’t used in the way it was designed for.

When asked to explain what that actually means, feedback tends to differ. Sometimes it’s a specific (new / sensitive / not properly commissioned etc.) piece of equipment that doesn’t work as expected. In other cases, the building is used by multiple tenants vs. a single one, other times twice as many people have been crammed into the space etc – but in general terms it all comes down to one stakeholder group: the occupants!

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that the way sites are presented on EnergyDeck has changed considerably.

For one thing, you can now get up and running much faster with our simpler site creation forms, while at the same time we’ve added tabs to give you the option to capture much more additional information about your building and how you use it.

As well as these two changes, there was an even more fundamental update relating to how buildings are conceptualised on EnergyDeck.

From the beginning, we have provided users with the ability to create sites and subsites. This meant you could create a building and then model individual areas inside that building, for example floors. However, if you wanted to go further and divide the areas into smaller areas, for example divide the floors into individual rooms, you couldn’t.

But that was then, and this is now: we’ve lifted this limitation meaning you can now divide and subdivide a building to your heart’s content!

We are delighted to announce that SPIMA recently signed a reseller agreement with EnergyDeck to provide its customers with an affordable and scalable energy management solution. SPIMA was formed in 1990 to serve the needs of the materials handling sector in Cyprus, especially in the areas of warehouse storage systems. The company's activities include a full range of supplies and services for the logistics industry. The latest announcement will see Spima entering the energy market through innovative products, as well as the offering of Energy Management through EnergyDeck.

Read more about SPIMA.

If you read the technology press, you will have seen a flurry of articles about the Heartbleed Bug this week. This bug is a serious vulnerability in OpenSSL, a software library used by a large number of web sites to deliver their services over encrypted connections, including EnergyDeck.

The security advisory about this vulnerability was first sent out on Monday night and we received it on Tuesday morning. We immediately took steps to verify whether the EnergyDeck site was impacted, discovered that it was and patched the system. This was done through an emergency fix by midday Tuesday.

Revising our security configuration and procedures is a normal process at EnergyDeck and we do it regularly to ensure that every issue is dealt with as quickly as possible. In this particular case, we are indebted to the open source community and in particular the Debian project for releasing a patch very quickly after the initial vulnerability was disclosed.