Leveraging Data to Drive Sustainability
Is your data hindering your sustainability goals?
Data is crucial for advancing sustainability initiatives, helping organizations assess and reduce their environmental impact. It enables analysis, benchmarking, comparisons, and validation of sustainability efforts. However, in the age of Big Data, many organizations struggle to identify the right data to focus on and how to use it effectively. While certifications like LEED and regulations like New York City’s Local Law 97 set reporting standards, they don’t provide guidance on how to collect, analyze, and report the necessary data.
Our Intelligent Buildings team specializes in optimizing data flows while helping clients achieve their sustainability goals more efficiently and effectively.
Defining the “Why” Behind Sustainability Initiatives
Our process begins by identifying the core purpose of your sustainability initiative. Organizations launch these projects for various reasons, and understanding the motivation is key to crafting an effective data strategy.
- Are you aiming to reduce energy costs or obtain a sustainability certification?
- Are you focused on decarbonization or regulatory compliance?
- Is your goal to increase renewable energy usage or improve energy resilience?
We work with clients to clarify their sustainability objectives, ensuring they adopt the right data-driven approach.
Data Challenges from Unclear Sustainability Goals:
- Fragmented Data: Sustainability data is scattered across systems like energy meters, IoT sensors, utility bills, and building automation platforms.
- Siloed Data: Even when data is consolidated, it often remains isolated within departments or teams, reducing its effectiveness.
- Incompatible Systems: Systems that cannot integrate make it difficult to unify data for comprehensive analysis.
- Costly Workarounds: Integrating fragmented data usually requires expensive, labor-intensive processes.
- Limited Insights: Without a unified data approach, meaningful analysis and actionable insights are challenging to achieve.
Breaking Down Data Silos for Better Efficiency
Organizations face two types of data silos: between teams and between buildings.
- Team silos happen when different groups unknowingly collect the same data, causing unnecessary costs and wasted effort.
- Building silos occur when building management teams gather similar data in different ways across locations, making comparisons and benchmarking difficult.
When opportunities for energy savings are identified, some organizations are limited by incompatible systems that can’t integrate with each other. This prevents a full view of building performance and sustainability metrics.
Newcomb & Boyd’s Comprehensive Approach to Sustainability
Our Intelligent Buildings team helps clients make the most of their data to support, not limit, their sustainability goals. A global bank came to us needing occupancy data for LEED certification. After looking into their needs, we realized the solution required more than just occupancy sensors. We also identified the need for secure data transmission and management.
To address this, we designed:
- A top-tier occupancy sensor system.
- A secure technology setup that meets their policies.
- A system to manage and report data automatically.
This will allow the bank to collect data securely, and automate its reporting for LEED certification. Our approach also combines data from systems like HVAC, lighting, energy meters, weather, and indoor air quality, helping the client understand how these systems work together and affect energy use. This enables them to optimize energy consumption and confirm the success of their sustainability projects.
How can we help you harness your data for sustainability?
Intelligent Buildings Studio Director
T (404)730-8528
E mshirley@newcomb-boyd.com