Carbon-transition technology refers to various technologies and practices that can reduce or eliminate the carbon emissions associated with commercial real estate. Decarbonizing commercial real estate requires ongoing monitoring and assessment to ensure progress and identify opportunities for further improvement.
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Audette, a clean technology start-up, is developing low-carbon transition strategies for commercial real estate. Audette offers low-carbon commercial real estate portfolio planning. Its technology analyzes and monitors critical building data to assist users in establishing, tracking, and achieving carbon emission reduction goals.
The Need for Decarbonizing Commercial Real Estate
The commercial real estate sector faces a challenge. It accounts for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet most building owners have no idea how to minimize their carbon footprint. The real estate industry is responsible for significant global greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from the energy used for heating, cooling, and powering the building. These emissions contribute to climate change and harm the environment.
Decarbonizing commercial real estate is also significant for economic reasons. As energy prices rise and organizations increase their focus on reducing emissions, energy-efficient buildings are becoming increasingly valuable. Decarbonizing commercial real estate also helps reduce operating costs, improve indoor air quality and comfort, and increase the value of the building.
Industrial Potential of Decarbonizing Commercial Real Estate
Net-zero carbon planning for commercial real estate can significantly impact the industrial sector by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting energy efficiency. This can be achieved through various measures, such as using renewable energy sources, energy-efficient building design and construction, and incorporating smart building technology.
Implementing these strategies can help mitigate climate change's effects and lead to cost savings for building owners and tenants.
It can also improve the overall performance of the building and make it more attractive to potential tenants and buyers. Net-zero carbon planning for commercial real estate is a win-win situation for both the environment and the economy.
Audette: Offering Net-Zero Carbon Planning for Commercial Real Estate
Offering net-zero carbon planning for commercial real estate is an essential aspect of the industry and a crucial step towards reducing the environmental impact of commercial real estate and addressing climate change.
Commercial real estate can reduce carbon emissions and move toward a net-zero carbon footprint by implementing energy-efficient technologies, renewable energy generation, and sustainable design principles.
As the economy instantly shifts, many property owners, particularly experienced asset managers, recognize the financial benefits of decarbonizing their building assets. Unfortunately, current carbon reduction planning lacks scalability. It would take every sustainability specialist nearly 200 years to establish reduction strategies for every building. Behind this bottleneck lie billions of dollars of untapped market activity.
Audette, a cleantech company in Victoria, provides net-zero planning for corporate real estate assets. Audette's patented AI-based system constructs and manages carbon roadmaps for commercial projects, facilitating strategic decision-making, comparing decarbonization strategies, and maximizing ROI. Notable partners of the firm include Colliers, Onni Investment Group, and the Alberta Ecotrust Foundation.
The Technology Behind Audette
Audette uses an AI-based platform to analyze the entire building asset and identify the decarbonization paths with the best return on investment across entire regions.
They provide data at the macro level for economic planning and individual building owners, who use their records to construct carbon step-down programs for their properties. Connections at the building level retrain their AI models, resulting in more precision at the macro scale and generating a flywheel effect.
AI-based software can play a significant role in reducing carbon emissions in commercial real estate. AI-based building management systems can optimize energy usage by analyzing data from sensors and other sources to identify inefficiencies and adjust to optimize energy consumption. These systems can also predict when equipment will likely fail, allowing for scheduled maintenance and reducing downtime.
AI-based systems can analyze historical data to predict future energy consumption patterns, allowing for proactive adjustments to reduce energy usage.
The AI-based system developed by Audette modernizes the outdated method of evaluating the conservation capacity of properties. The end-to-end platform collects data to discover and assess the potential for low-carbon building upgrades and assists building owners in locating finance and incentives that can lower the cost of retrofitting by up to 90%.
Key Features Provided by Audette
Audette provides an advanced platform for controlling carbon risk and preparing toward net-zero. Key features offered by Audette include the following:
- Carbon roadmap: Audette gathers operational data and overlays information on the environment around the investments to observe a variety of outcomes.
- Capital Planning: Audette obtains suggestions for carbon-reduction initiatives accompanied by site-specific business cases.
- Final dismantling: Audette combines energy and equipment data with a building's operating profile; its platform displays where energy, costs, and pollutants are migrating by equipment type without requiring capacitive sensors or power meters.
- Energy management: Audette establishes energy consumption benchmarks and monitors performance on a month-to-month basis. It enables the monitoring of portfolio-wide energy statistics via a single dashboard.
Future of Audette
Audette just concluded a $12.8 million seed round with some of the industry's most prominent energy sector investors. With this funding, they will launch its system in 150 cities within two years, recognizing $1 trillion in retrofit potential and over 800 megatons of greenhouse gas emission savings.
Collaborating with cities, investment firms, and financiers in its soon-to-be-launched '100 to 0' initiative will accelerate the continent-wide flow of money and technology, sparking the zero-carbon revolution for North American real estate.
The Future of Decarbonizing Commercial Real Estate
Decarbonizing commercial properties requires continuous monitoring and evaluation to ensure progress and discover the potential for future improvement.
Audette offers low-carbon commercial real estate portfolio planning. Its system analyzes and monitors critical building data to aid customers in establishing, monitoring, and achieving emission reduction goals. In the future, the Audette platform can help make net-zero carbon emissions in every commercial real estate possible.
References and Further Reading
Audette secures a $1M seed round to bring commercial real estate into a low-carbon future. (n.d.). GZ Module Pages. Retrieved 23 January 2023. Available from: https://members.viatec.ca/news/Details/audette-secures-1m-seed-round-to-bring-commercial-real-estate-into-a-low-carbon-future-75052
Carbon Planning. (n.d.). Audette. Retrieved 23 January 2023. Available from: https://audette.io/carbon-planning
Spanner, M. M., & Wein, J. (2020). Carbon risk real estate monitor: Making decarbonization in the real estate sector measurable. Journal of European Real Estate Research, 13(3), 277–299. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JERER-05-2020-0031/full/html
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