Incorporate Your Building Into Your Sustainability Plan

Companies face increasing pressure today – from stakeholders, employees as well as regulatory agencies – to curb energy consumption, reduce carbon emissions and create more sustainable, healthier facilities. ESG commitments are also increasing the impetus to make buildings more sustainable.

There's an urgent reason for this: commercial buildings currently account for almost a third of global energy consumption and 37% of global energy-related CO2 emissions. While 28% of those emissions are related to building operations or the energy used to heat, cool, and power the building – many building owners likely don't have device or asset-level insight into energy consumption or carbon impact.

With roughly 80% of today’s buildings expected to be standing in 2050, the challenge of controlling escalating energy use, particularly in older buildings, to meet carbon emissions reduction targets will only increase. How to make real change happen? The latest generation of ready-now, cloud-based solutions such as Honeywell Forge Sustainability+ for Buildings | Carbon and Energy Management can help building owners and operators meet two pressing, yet often conflicting, objectives: optimizing indoor air quality and reducing the environmental impact of buildings with the aim of improving carbon-reduction goals.

The scalable, system-agnostic application uses advanced controls capabilities use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to create a baseline of energy consumption and carbon emissions across building assets and can help monitor, control and optimize those assets. It can decipher how a building uses energy while providing a clear analysis of energy and carbon emissions (scope 1 and 2) at the asset, site and portfolio levels. It uses smart meters, sensors and utility data to segment actual consumption and energy emissions by type of utility. Then, the application analyzes that data alongside factors like weather, occupancy and utility rates to provide insight into building performance. Using the collected data, it optimizes the building systems to reach desired outcomes – without impacting the comfort or productivity of occupants.

Tenants of premium office buildings have their own sustainability commitments and the pressure to meet those commitments is becoming a critical factor as they consider their leased spaces. Honeywell has launched a new digital signage offering that brings to life the on-going savings and reduction of sustainability technologies to tenants and occupants. This helps the tenant to communicate savings to their employees/visitors and for the owner to demonstrate value and justify premiums.

Using tools like this, building owners can make their facilities more sustainable without sacrificing the occupant experience or the bottom line.