The Covid-19 lockdown has highlighted the need for business owners to re-assess their facilities’ health amid growing concerns related to occupant health and well-being, and environmental impact. Furthermore, the temporary closure of many businesses and the knock-on effect in terms of revenue has forced those managing building facilities to think seriously about moving away from antiquated, maintenance-intensive assets and identify opportunities for sustained operational savings.
Green building certification programs such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) have long provided a framework for which facility managers and engineers, can use to guide building sustainability strategy, retrofit projects, and efficiency upgrades. Third-party certification also demonstrates energy compliance with widely accepted, recognized benchmarks and standards.
Importance of data
At the core of any efficiency or certification project is the data collected from devices measuring resource consumption in a building. This data is key to determine how well a building or portfolio is performing against certification standards and requirements, and also forms the basis for further analysis to identify potential inefficiencies.
In response to the need to automate the collection and management of data from industrial and commercial sites/buildings, Wattics and Arc Skoru—the GBCI’s building sustainability scoring platform—partnered up to deliver a solution that helps sustainability consultants, green building professionals and facility management teams to scale building performance analysis and green certification for large property portfolios.
Wattics+Arc solution
The solution is the integration of the two software platforms (Arc & Wattics) which greatly automates the recording of data from utility meters and sensors connected to Wattics energy software and sends it to the associated project(s) in the Arc platform.
The energy monitoring data received from the Wattics platform contribute toward the performance scores for energy, as well as an overall sustainability score based on operational building performance data for five categories – energy, water, waste, transportation and human experience which includes factors like indoor air quality (IAQ). The score is used to determine readiness for performance-based green building certifications such as LEED.
Scaling up
What makes the Wattics energy management platform especially attractive to owners and managers of large commercial and industrial building portfolios like hotels or retail is its ability to process large amounts of utility/IoT/sub-meter and other external data eg. Heating and Cooling Degree Days which can be visualised and analysed from a user-friendly web-interface. This enables analyses to be done at scale, for example, identifying trends in consumption, pinpointing inefficiencies and anomalies, the calculation and tracking of GHG emissions as well as benchmarking & KPI analysis across multiple sites/buildings.
Furthermore, the platform provides the capability to measure, verify, forecast and report on real savings for efficiency upgrades & retrofits—which has the potential to significantly improve building resource efficiency and performance as well as a project’s Arc score for certification purposes.
Wattics+Arc integration: Case Study
Energy performance in a building constitutes the highest percentage of its overall Arc sustainability score – presenting significant opportunity to substantially improve energy efficiency provided that the right tools are on hand to enable the collection, visualization and analysis of building energy data.
For BEE Incorporations, a multi-national sustainability-focused engineering consultancy, energy performance and efficiency was a top priority in the pursuit of Gold LEED certification for its client, a global luxury fashion retailer. Wattics served as BEE’s energy management partner delivering a technology solution that would enable them to:
1) Implement ongoing energy monitoring and performance management for their clients’ fashion retail stores in APAC and commercial offices in Asia and North America,
2) Meet LEEDv4.1 O+M prerequisites and credit requirements.
Below Summary of Wattics’ LEED credit contribution to Prada Gold LEEDv4.1 O+M green building certification project:
- Automated collection of real-time data from energy meters
- Identification of energy efficiency measures for ASHRAE Level 1 energy audit
- Analysis of energy consumption values and energy savings
- Import of data to Arc, i.e. monthly energy data (kWh)
- Meet LEED O+M Prerequisites and Credit
Image: Energy data integration process – BEE Incorporations case study
In a recent webinar, BEE Incorporations presented its case study on how it helped its client become the first in the world, as well as the very first retailer, to achieve Gold under LEED4.1 O+M.
BEE Incorporations also demonstrates the first Wattics-Arc integration case and how the two complementary data-driven platforms (Wattics+Arc) work together to deliver the following key features & benefits for its global fashion retail client and many others:
- Enables automated data collection and recording of consumption values from tens, hundreds, even thousands of buildings in Arc
- Eliminates manual entry of consumption values in the Arc platform; no more human data entry errors
- Leverage Wattics monitoring data toward your project’s performance score in Arc (electricity)
- Scale performance analysis & green certifications for large building portfolios
- Pin-point and analyse operations/facilities contributing to inefficient resource use and costs
- Identify winning conservation actions and technologies that increase building resource efficiency and positively impact Arc score, while driving down costs
Here’s their story:
About Wattics:
Wattics is an enterprise cloud-based energy analytics software used by energy service companies, energy consultancies, as well as green building, and facility management professionals to monitor energy consumption, spot energy inefficiencies, increase sustainability and reduce CO2 emissions for buildings and businesses in commercial and industrial environments. The software platform enables the collection, management, and analysis of utility/IoT/sub-meter data to conduct energy audits, forecast savings, benchmark building portfolios and analyse KPIs, measure and verify efficiency and renewable energy projects, analyse tariffs and create sustainability reports at scale.
About Arc Skoru:
Arc is a technology platform that helps create better buildings and places for people and the environment. Arc empowers its users to understand and enhance their sustainability performance, promote human health and wellbeing and contribute to a higher quality of life. Arc calculates a performance score based on global building data and action-oriented strategies across five categories, including energy, water, waste, transportation and human experience. This score can be used to understand your sustainability or achieve LEED certification.
