Comment by Craig Mellis, Senior Advisor – Decarbonisation of Complex Sites

When we think about energy use, it’s frequently our homes and vehicles that come to mind. Often overlooked are the non-domestic buildings – our workplaces, businesses and vital social infrastructure like our schools and hospitals. Energy is one of the largest costs for lots of these organisations, yet for many it isn’t closely managed.

The truth for many that manage these buildings is that they face incredibly knotty problems in managing energy. They cover a patchwork of buildings that vary in age, purpose and performance. Static benchmarks exist to compare these buildings to, but are they really based on similar buildings?

Helping the NHS understand where to effectively start saving energy

With funding from Innovate UK, our InSite project set out to solve this problem. By gathering large volumes of data, we aimed to help the NHS build smart benchmarks used to profile energy use across buildings of similar age, purpose and performance.

Partnering with NHS England, this resulted in one of the largest energy trials ever seen in the UK. We worked with more than 74 NHS Trusts mapping energy performance by collecting detailed consumption data from over 3,000 meters, generating insights into hospital energy consumption that allowed us to go from simple annual comparisons to weekly, daily and half hourly insight.

Sharing key lessons

The key questions are: what did we learn, what impact will it have, and how can others outside of the NHS adopt what’s been learned to start understanding and reducing their own energy use? We have published a report that you can download below which provides a summary of our lessons and some of the opportunities that this data offers for our future actions to manage our energy better. Applicable to all non-domestic buildings, it offers the opportunity to really start to get a grasp on how businesses can save money, become more efficient and transition whole sectors.

What’s next?

Our InSite project has shown how fragmented data can be transformed into clear, actionable intelligence that makes it easier for the public sector to deliver successful decarbonisation strategies.

If you are an organisation which faces challenges around data for non-domestic buildings, or if you have data that you think could be of value to support those that do, we are always looking for more ways we can use InSite to provide support. Please contact us insite@es.catapult.org.uk