Data-driven insights from Internet of Things (IoT) devices are enabling energy and sustainability experts to make better-informed decisions like never before. Energy use within buildings is inherently variable, and until recently, even the brightest minds were in the dark when it came to explaining fluctuations in usage, due to the long list of factors that can cause a building’s energy usage to change seemingly at random. Having a fundamental understanding of how a building uses energy and what causes it to change is essential to optimising performance in the long term.

Every experienced energy and sustainability professional who reads this blog, knows of course, that the first step of implementing energy management solutions, is acquisition of the building consumption data. This process, involves cooperation between different industry groups, and can often be long, complicated and costly.

In my last blog, I have shared my thoughts on why it is so important to access the right data when developing your Net Zero Carbon programme.

Lets dive deeper into the challenging process of energy data acquisition, and discuss ways to make it easier, more effective and more cost efficient.

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, ESG topics were steadily making their way to the top of forward-thinking stakeholders’ agendas in commercial real estate. With the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak being felt across the sector and the world today, different views on how ESG performance would be prioritised in commercial real estate going forward in the immediate and the longer term are emerging. We thought this would be a good opportunity to share what we have been learning on the ground regarding ESG topics before and after the arrival of the COVID-19 outbreak, especially from our experience working and exchanging ideas with our partners and customers who are ESG practitioners in the field.

The Committee on Climate Change ( CCC) advised in 2019, that the UK should be aiming for net zero emissions by 2045-2050 in order to be compatible with the1.5ºC Paris Agreement goal.

Its recommendations were:

• For the UK, a new target: net-zero greenhouse gases by 2050 (up from the existing emissions reductions target of 80% from 1990 levels by 2050);
• For Scotland, a net-zero date of 2045, 'reflecting Scotland’s greater relative capacity to remove emissions than the UK as a whole';
• For Wales, a 95% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050, reflecting it having 'less opportunity for CO2 storage and relatively high agricultural emissions that are hard to reduce'.

But how to get there and why is it proving not to be so easy?

39% - this is a figure the real estate sector knows well too well. And this must change.

According the UN’s Global Status Report, the built environment makes up approximately 39% of the global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. In order to be on track to meet global climate ambitions set forth in the Paris agreement, we need to see a 30% reduction by 2030. Global buildings sector energy demand rose 7% from 2010 to 2019, so drastic action is needed.