(Credit: Pixabay)Commercial real estate carbon emissions account for a large portion of the nation's emissions. According to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, buildings across the US account for 40% of carbon emissions. Because the energy demands of buildings are so large, designing and constructing energy efficient buildings can lead to large and vital reductions in energy consumption. Yet, despite remarkable improvements in the energy efficiency of individual components and appliances since the 1973 oil embargo, building energy consumption is increasing.
Recently we caught up with Matt Ganser, EVP of Engineering and Technology at Carbon Lighthouse, to learn more about the company’s new partnership with Amazon Web Services and their overall goals when it comes to carbon emission reduction.
Carbon Lighthouse is working with Amazon Web Services to cut commercial real estate carbon emissions. Can you explain exactly how this works?
Carbon Lighthouse has a single mission: to stop climate change. Over the past decade, we’ve successfully
(Matt Ganser, EVP of Engineering and Technology, Carbon Lighthouse. Credit: Carbon Lighthouse)been working toward this mission by developing a business model and our patented AI platform CLUES to help existing buildings — one of the biggest contributors to the country’s CO2 emissions — reduce their energy use and overall carbon emissions.
However, buildings’ energy systems are a collection of complex, varying, and dynamic control systems, data standards, and equipment configurations.
We tap the power of machine learning to analyze billions of data points — all in an effort to find hidden energy efficiency opportunities in lighting and HVAC systems and maximize carbon reductions.
AWS compute and data storage technologies help Carbon Lighthouse manage our ever-expanding database of real building data while reducing the headaches of data at scale.
What were some of the challenges encountered with this initiative?
When we first began to collect and analyze building data a decade ago, we did so manually in spreadsheets. As our client base quickly grew and we collected more data per building, we needed more sophisticated tools to help us manage that data to ensure data integrity, security and accessibility — all critical to delivering data-backed recommendations to our commercial real estate (CRE) clients.
We turned to AWS’s compute and data storage solutions to build a foundation that can continue to scale with our needs. Today, Carbon Lighthouse collects 690 million new data points per building each month. With several hundred buildings under our belt (and growing), the sheer volume of data we’re working with would be impossible to manage without AWS data storage solutions.
How does this help commercial real estate owners and/or developers?
Data is at the heart of the value that Carbon Lighthouse delivers to CRE owners and investors. We knew we had to incentivized owners and investors with profitable climate solutions so they no longer had to choose between financial or climate impact — they could have both. Having fully accessible data enables us to properly analyze and guide our CRE clients with energy optimization opportunities to drive financial and environmental impact across their portfolio.
Further, CRE investors are increasingly using Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reporting as a qualifier to evaluating potential investment opportunities. Having the right data accessible to share with clients on the true environmental impact of their buildings gives them a competitive advantage and will help in the current and long-term economic recovery of the CRE industry from the effects of COVID-19.
Why does Carbon Lighthouse feel this is such an important project?
Carbon Lighthouse was founded to stop climate change. Yet, given the rate of climate change, we had to identify an area where we could make the biggest impact as quickly as possible. With 40% of the country’s annual carbon emissions coming from the built environment, we knew commercial real estate (CRE) was the industry to focus on. Our business model and success is based on having deep insights into a building’s operational systems to clearly demonstrate the financial and environmental impact of our solutions. To date, we’ve been able to eliminate 260,000 metric tons of CO2.
