Adding value to your Energy Management Plan: Net-Zero, ESG and Enhanced Productivity

7th July 2023

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Soben’s Digital Twin partner IES, share their insights on how to add value to your Energy Management Plan. 

For most businesses reducing energy costs is top of the agenda right now, but it isn’t the only priority. Looming Net-Zero targets, ESG disclosure requirements and the health, wellbeing & productivity of your employees can all be addressed in one comprehensive strategy.

Reducing your energy costs should not mean having to compromise on other business priorities. In fact, ensuring your energy cost strategy is aligned to climate and ESG commitments, employee needs and other business objectives is a smart move to protect against other unwanted costs and business risks.

Potential climate risks for global commercial real estate assets have been estimated at USD $5 trillion. Lower sale or rental values, increased construction and operating costs, financial penalties and increased insurance premiums are just a few of the consequences of inefficient buildings.

While many organisations have joined the Race to Zero, most don’t know where to start, especially when it comes to their buildings. However, digital twins offer a solution for companies to analyse their carbon output and find ways to reduce it. We help organisations to simulate and monitor operational performance in real-time, understand the impact of future scenarios and net-zero interventions – prior to investment – and identify inefficiencies and improvements. This can help to identify cost savings, but also informs decarbonisation roadmaps, showing what actions are needed to meet specific targets, tracking progress and identifying shortfalls in existing energy management plans.

A winning partnership

Adding to this solution, our new partnership with Soben brings their expertise in commercial and cost analysis and vast bank of cost data to ensure the affordability and financial viability of sustainability initiatives. With this additional insight from Soben, our joint Zero Carbon Roadmaps service provides property owners and managers with clear decarbonization strategies for assets, whilst optimizing asset profitability and ensuring all interventions offer positive returns. Demonstrating tangible return on investment has long been a barrier to digital twin adoption, however this new partnership will remove this road block by showcasing profitable solutions.

This approach can also help to address concerns round energy security and fossil fuel divestment. Identifying ways to reduce reliance on the grid, share energy locally and increase the capacity of renewable energy generation and storage to improve resilience – and the benefits do not end there.

Added value

According to Deloitte’s 2022 ‘Commercial Real Estate Outlook’ 60% of real estate owners believe that ESG initiatives bring new opportunities and give them a competitive edge. A digital twin can be used to track & communicate ESG KPIs via bespoke dashboards, simulating simple optimisation scenarios that enhance ESG ratings and helping to meet disclosure requirements.

Companies can also balance their energy use with occupant needs, using their digital twin to monitor and implement changes to improve air quality, comfort and ventilation, generating an estimated $7,500 per person/ year in productivity. Studies have shown that better indoor air quality can lead to productivity improvements of 8-11%, so in organisations where 90% of typical overheads are spent on employees, minor improvements in productivity can substantially impact turnover and profit. Research has also shown that employees in green-certified buildings have 26% higher cognitive function test scores and 30% fewer sick building symptoms versus non-certified.

So, it doesn’t need to be a case of “either/or” when it comes to reducing your energy costs. Our digital twin approach supports informed business decisions that not only save you money, but also deliver on energy resilience and net-zero targets, enhanced ESG ratings and employee productivity.

To find out more about optimising your energy management plans, visit www.iesve.com/digital-twins or contact us to chat with one of our expert team.

 

Webinar: Making Sustainability Affordable with Digital Twins

Join IES and Soben at our exclusive webinar ‘Making Sustainability Affordable with Digital Twins’ on Tuesday, 11th July, 3pm – 4pm BST. Sign up here.

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