Businesses and organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the need to monitor and manage their water consumption, as evidenced by the growing amount of water-consumption data that are being submitted into a global sustainability-benchmarking database that Fabriq has been assembling.

As the 2019 GRESB submission cycle will be in the mind of those in the real estate space soon (if it isn’t already), this is a good time to talk about Fabriq's partnership with GRESB and how the Fabriq OS platform is being updated in collaboration with GRESB to make the sustainability reporting process more streamlined for stakeholders involved.

No-one said it would be easy. But did it have to be this hard? At least it’s hard AND fun at the same time.Here are the seven lessons of building optimisation that we learned during the years since the founding of Fabriq - so you don't have to!

Two weeks ago, it was UCL Sustainability Week! To quote UCL’s website: “Sustainability week is a celebration of all the fantastic sustainability initiatives taking place at UCL.” Fabriq’s task force - Tom Wilson and I - joined the party!

We are thrilled to be working with Savills, and want to take the opportunity to mention the possibilities that the Fabriq OS platform is expected to offer Savills as well as their clients who are committed to actively managing their real-estate portfolios’ sustainability performance.

I live in a mid-terrace house that was built early in the 20th Century using solid brick construction. It's one of those typical suburban houses with nice bay windows and a small gas fireplace in the lounge, the sort you find all over the UK. Like most houses of this type, it is draughty, badly insulated and very inefficient in its energy use. I am starting a project to fix that and I would like to have the primary improvement works done under the Green Deal. The Green Deal is a new initiative by the UK government that became effective at the end of January and that aims to reduce the number of buildings that require high energy spendings in order to operate. It is designed so that it can benefit landlords and tenants alike, as well as owner occupiers. The primary way in which it does this is through easy financing that is linked to the property rather than the owner or occupier: the idea is that once the works are done, the energy bills of the property will go down. So the loan that finances the project is repaid against savings on the electricity bill. If the property is sold, the remainder of the loan is sold with it and keeps being applied to the electricity bills of that property. This has a number of advantages for tenants and landlords: An initial survey of the property is done by an accredited assessor who will identify what are the most cost effective measures for that property based on its characteristics and the way the people live in it, There is no upfront cost apart from the cost of the initial assessment, As the loan is made against the property rather than a person, there are no credit checks, which makes the finance and the whole scheme much more accessible to people who typically find it difficult to obtain credit, such as people who are self-employed or have bad credit history, You can receive cashback repayments against particular measures, You can have additional works that are not covered by the Green Deal carried out at the same time, as long as you finance them separately.

EnergyDeck has joined Utilidex's utilidex50 offering. Utilidex aims to deliver EnergyDeck integrated with their inMotion solution both in the UK as well as the Australian and New Zealand markets. inMotion significantly reduces the integration challenge for energy retailers and allows them to deploy value added services to their customers within a short time frame. “Our vision for the utilidex50 is to attract innovative offerings that can easily plug into the utilidex platform,” commented Richard Brys, CEO, “We want to attract high calibre companies into the space, allowing them to deliver their innovations and ideas to the wider energy community and in particular to utilities who wish to adapt their business models and offerings. EnergyDeck is a great fit for this initiative. Led by a high calibre management team, EnergyDeck has a vision to truly re-shape the way customers interact with their energy consumption to significantly reduce costs and their carbon footprint. We support EnergyDeck wholeheartedly in this endeavour and want our utility customers and their end customers to benefit from the offering.”  

We're pleased to announce that our smart importer has just become even smarter, and now also understands Green Button data. Green Button is a US based effort to make energy data more accessible and actionable for consumers. From the official website at http://www.greenbuttondata.org Green Button is an industry-led effort that responds to a White House call-to-action: provide electricity customers with easy access to their energy usage data in a consumer-friendly and computer-friendly format via a "Green Button" on electric utilities' website. Green Button is based on a common technical standard developed in collaboration with a public-private partnership supported by the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology. Voluntary adoption of a consensus standard by utilities across the Nation allows software developers and other entrepreneurs to leverage a sufficiently large market to support the creation of innovative applications that can help consumers make the most of their energy usage information.  

Launched by Forum for the Future in 2009, the West of England Carbon Challenge (WECC) today supports more than 100 businesses, public and third sector organisations in Bristol and Bath on their path to reduce carbon emissions. It challenges participants to commit to making an annual cut in emissions for four years to reach a cumulative total of at least 10% by 2012/13. Members receive advice, tools and practical support to measure, manage and reduce their CO2 emissions.WECC participants now get free access to a Community version of EnergyDeck. It allows members to track up to 5 "meters" (i.e., data input sources) and access selected advanced features. Further, by signing up to the WECC group on EnergyDeck, participants can compare themselves against aggregate peer benchmarks and view savings measures (fully anonymised) implemented by others in the group. Forum for the Future - as the WECC group administrator - can easily view, analyse and aggregate the consumption data submitted by members in a single account.