Aerial shot of London at night
Aerial shot of London at night

Digital Transformation for NetZero

23 March 2021

We admit, navigating the route to NetZero can, at first, feel like mission impossible.

It has been widely reported by the UK Green building Council (UKGBC) that to reach NetZero by 2050, we need to reduce our buildings’ operational energy use intensity by more than 60%.

We all know that we cannot solve climate change without transforming our cities and buildings and with the UK Governments pledge to get to NetZero by 2050 a huge part of the responsibility to meet this target is on every business’s shoulders.

There is a lot to consider, a lot to get right and some effort and investment involved. But it shouldn’t be hard, and it will pay dividends. Digitalisation should be viewed as the enabler in making this a reality; it is key to making the path to NetZero smoother and technology provides the answers.

Once businesses embrace digital technologies to automate and improve building system processes and operations, they can improve maintenance routines and ensure equipment is only being used when it’s needed and that it’s running to the best of its ability with energy efficiency and carbon emission reduction at the heart.

The building blocks to meeting NetZero with digitisation:

  • Digitalise existing infrastructure and assets to improve the performance and efficiency of the in-building systems, business processes and operations.
  • Digitalise for interoperability of building systems and operations to ensure they work in harmony. Too often systems in buildings operate in isolation from others, this is common with heating and cooling systems operating at the same time in one space. In this instance they’re competing to heat and cool the same space, neither can achieve the set-points and in turn, operate harder and harder to no avail. Ultimately digital technologies ensure that the control strategy for one system doesn’t impact negatively on the control strategy of the other.
  • Digitalise the staff/building occupiers. Through smart systems, you can inform and gain buy-in from occupiers on the energy improvements you are making, the route to NetZero and how they can positively impact this. Building occupiers can help by working with the digital systems – to understand why they are set to operate in a certain way to ensure that they don’t override the air conditioning or request the temperature be turned up in winter or down in summer. To ensure building occupiers demand less on the internal environment where that has a direct correlation/impact to energy inefficiency.
  • Digitalisation can provide evidence with data and insights to keep staff engaged and show them their good work. The data can also showcase the business commitment to NetZero, articulating to the wider stakeholder community their environmental commitments.
  • Digitalise to decarbonize. Smart systems are becoming smarter and greener. Heat pumps are a great example of this, supported by the government for homes these devices do just as well heating commercial buildings.
  • Digitalise to go off-grid. Once you have improved the efficiency of in-building systems and business operations, next you can consider alternate sources of energy supply. Would solar PV supported by battery storage for example be a suitable off-grid solution for the building? Throughout the day your energy supply can digitally switch from grid supply to that provided by the PV, or even jump off the battery storage. A huge win for the environment as well as the business bottom line as you digitally switch to cheaper supply at the same time as Grid supply is the highest unit cost during a weekday.
  • Digitalise for data-driven insights – once you have digitized your systems you can use the data to provide insights to make business decisions that help to keep driving your route to NetZero. Identifying the opportunities as well as evidencing the improvements. Providing data for carbon reporting requirements as well as for stakeholders and the wider community’s interest in your commitment to NetZero.

CODA does all this and more. Connected to systems and off-grid solutions delivers data-driven insights through cloud-based software platforms and provides the required data needed for carbon reporting and validating your company’s commitment to NetZero. The team engineer the right solution for you now and along the way, provide more and more digital infrastructure as we work with you on your journey to NetZero. Our CODA solution is breaking down barriers in the IoT market and providing second to none analytics that supports NetZero roadmap development.

For more information or to find out how the team at CODA can help you, please call us on +44 345 241 2889 or email info@codacloud.io.