UK office buildings are wasting £60m of energy every year

Research from Green Alliance has shown that thousands of office buildings from five cities across the UK are losing £60 million in wasted energy every year, enough to power more than 100,000 homes. 

The situation is exemplified in London as the energy wasted in the capital is equivalent to the amount needed to power 65,000 homes. For London alone, businesses are losing £35 million and in terms of carbon, this equates to the same level of emissions as 46,000 cars per year. 

Furthermore, around 3,000 office spaces in the cities of Manchester, Bristol, Leeds and Birmingham could power more than 42,000 homes with the £25 million they are wasting in unnecessary bills. 

This is an alarming amount of money and energy wasted, especially as we face a climate crisis where the common goal is to reduce our emissions and impact on the planet. Despite this, little effort has been made to address the situation as most of the UK’s commercial buildings are energy inefficient and energy consumption has flatlined since 2002. 

One of the key solutions to operating commercial buildings more sustainably is the adoption of digital technology such as Twinview’s digital twin. The use of IoT and sensors to track metrics like the number of occupants in a space, along with a sophisticated artificial intelligence, means that patterns and trends can be identified which helps a business to make better and more informed decisions around their energy consumption. 

It is no longer enough to just replace a building’s bulbs with LED lighting or to ensure that its lighting and heating functions operate via a timing system. A building’s performance can be optimised, even whilst reducing costs, by learning how often and how spaces function. 

Evidence has shown that artificial intelligence energy optimisation systems can cut energy use in commercial buildings by 14% with payback in only a few months. In terms of London, this would equate to £13 million on their collective energy bill. 

Twinview is a browser-based digital twin platform for the property sector connecting building systems’ data to a 3D model viewed on a single dashboard. Twinview becomes your first step to achieving Net Zero by providing continuous live data and an optimised building performance whilst reducing costs and improving the user experience. Book a demo today.