COVID-19 | DATA MONITORING SAFETY IN NUMBERS Data monitoring can help identify poorly ventilated office spaces at risk from Covid-19, as well as highlight poorly performing HVAC systems during lockdowns, says Carbon Intelligences Khasha Mohammadian T he Covid-19 crisis has put enormous pressure on businesses to reduce costs, while ensuring the health and safety of their staff. Weve seen smart building technologies help facilities teams manage assets remotely, improve visibility, and allow greater control over building performance when it matters most. In March, social distancing and lockdown measures came into force to curb the spread of the virus. With many buildings largely empty, facilities managers were presented with the challenge of reducing energy consumption to the minimum. At Carbon Intelligence, we capture energy data from more than 40,000 buildings and provide many of our clients with data-driven insights, actions and optimisation services. Our services cover areas such as improving energy performance and comfort in buildings, as part of our mission to enable a zero-carbon economy. Shortly after lockdown, we carried out a macro-scale analysis on 300 buildings with high-quality, half-hourly electricity data. Many may think an empty building should result in close to no energy consumption, but we found that, even in the best-performing buildings, energy consumption was only around half of pre-lockdown levels. The worst 10% of buildings only reduced energy consumption by 3% in the first week after lockdown. As lockdown continued, we saw more buildings gradually reduce their energy spend, but those with the three key ingredients of visibility, control and proactive management continued to outperform the rest, and responded to changes the fastest. We recommended optimisation measures that our clients could implement quickly during the low-occupancy period (see panel, Top tips during lockdown and low-occupancy periods). Data the missing piece of the puzzle Empty buildings and a livestream of data have given our engineers the opportunity to reveal many hard-tofind issues and unlock huge, long-term environmental and financial gains. Some examples include faulty or miscalibrated sensors, passing valves and control issues, which cause a false demand whether or not buildings are fully occupied but these issues are a lot easier to identify in empty buildings. Above all these issues sat one key finding from our analysis; buildings, in general, are not designed to respond to very low loads and there will always be some unavoidable baseload. Net zero is a hot topic at the moment, and we know from UK Green Building Council and LETI guidance that a standard office will need to achieve an energy-use intensity of 70kWhe.m-2 of net lettable area per year to be aligned with a net-zero future. Lockdown has shown us that even an empty building is a long way from achieving this intensity. Our analysis on a sample of air conditioned 30 October 2020 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Oct20 pp30-32 Covid office data.indd 30 25/09/2020 14:47