For many organizations, gaps in energy data can hinder decarbonization planning. Carbon Signal provides a simple solution.

Introduction

The real estate sector faces challenges with comprehensive whole-building energy data. While the increasing regulatory environment surrounding mandatory reporting and disclosure encourages improvements, many building owners and asset managers still struggle with gaps in energy data for their real estate portfolios. There may be incomplete energy data in a building for multiple reasons.

• For investment and asset managers conducting due diligence on a potential acquisition, energy data is seldom provided.
• If a building was recently purchased, a complete calendar year of energy utility data might not yet be available.
• Corporate tenants in multi-tenant buildings may have limited access to “base building” energy data, including data from the heating and cooling systems used throughout the building.

For many organizations, gaps in energy data can hinder decarbonization planning. First, data collection efforts often leave little budget or staff time for decarbonization planning. Additionally, there is the sentiment that meaningful decarbonization analysis can only occur after obtaining clean and complete energy data. Carbon Signal provides a simple solution to both perceived concerns. Even with incomplete energy data in a building portfolio, our platform can provide detailed retrofit recommendations with associated energy savings and costs. The following are a couple of common energy data gap scenarios we encounter with our customers.

Example 1: No energy data

Our investment management and asset management customers often encounter this situation during due diligence for potential acquisitions. For investment managers seeking to create decarbonization capital plans before assets enter the portfolio as part of ESG due diligence, the process will usually include asking the vendor for the energy consumption of the building. Unfortunately, it is often the case that the energy consumption is unavailable or will not be provided by the vendor.

Even without energy utility data, it is still crucial to equip the deal team with project-level costs and savings for capital planning related to decarbonization. By supplying our platform with basic information on the asset, such as location and building sector, we can still create a building energy model and decarbonization plan – including capital retrofit costs – with a representative and typical building in the specified real estate market.

Example 2: Missing months of utility data

There are situations where an asset or building could be missing a few months of data. For example, if a building is newly purchased or leased, there could be months at the beginning or end of the year when energy bills were the responsibility of a different entity.

In situations like these, Carbon Signal can use the energy data for the available months and create a building energy model with building characteristics aligning with those months. Accordingly, the platform’s resultant building energy model would intelligently fill the missing months of energy data with what we would expect the building to use in those remaining months.

Example 3: Partial building data (only leased spaces and no "base building data")

As a tenant in a multi-tenanted office building, it is common to only have access to energy data specific to one’s leased area, such as electricity usage for lighting and equipment – there may be a lack of visibility into “base-building” energy data, which includes shared systems like central heating, cooling, and ventilation.

Carbon Signal excels in automatically interpreting this limited scope of energy data. If tenant energy data (exclusive of heating, cooling, and ventilation) is provided as input, our platform intelligently detects a lack of seasonal variation in energy consumption. In other words, the platform knows that energy data in the colder months should have higher energy consumption when heating systems work harder; conversely, during warmer months, cooling systems drive higher energy consumption. When this seasonal variation in energy consumption is not present in the energy data (as would be the case with tenant data without base-building energy), the platform creates a building energy model that fills those gaps attributed to heating and cooling.

Conclusion

Missing data should not be an inhibitor for delaying planning for decarbonization. In light of increasing regulatory and investor pressure for progress on decarbonization, our platform makes it easy to begin your decarbonization journey. Ready to learn more? Contact us to see how Carbon Signal can help with your decarbonization efforts.