Energy drift: what is it and why should property owners care?

Just like cars, buildings are vulnerable to equipment deficiencies and general wear and tear over time. These can cause buildings to deviate or “drift” away from their intended operational status, as commissioned when they were designed and built.

Left unchecked, energy drift can significantly decrease the efficiency of a building’s systems, and the numbers are higher than property managers might expect. As a result of this drift, properties can see energy efficiency deteriorate by between 10% and 30% over a one- to two-year period, according to research from Texas A&M University and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The result is a less efficient system – one that uses more energy, has higher maintenance costs and generates increased capital expenses due to faster deterioration.

Over time, even small deviations in performance can add up to significantly hit efficiency – and budget. In addition to the drain on efficiency, energy drift can disrupt occupier comfort, and often leads to longer-term equipment issues that can pose safety risks in buildings.

How can energy drift be identified?

Continuous monitoring of equipment allows property owners to identify problems and variances when they start, so these issues don’t have a chance to take root in your system and grow.

Monitoring also addresses the issues that come with seasonal changes. These largely go unaccounted for with standard commissioning or recommissioning, which only provide a snapshot of how the building should operate.

The gold standard is live automated monitoring and optimisation of equipment, so it can be continuously calibrated, adjusted, maintained or even replaced before causing a costly problem.

This can improve energy and carbon efficiency, eliminate repeated maintenance costs to fix equipment retroactively and reduce the incidence of capital expenditure for equipment replacement before its full lifecycle is complete.

How can energy drift be prevented?

Working with groundbreaking technology, IBOS (Intelligent Building Operating System), our teams address, prevent and solve energy drift, for example by monitoring and benchmarking live energy audits to identify areas of weakness or inefficiency.

Using IBOS, expert teams and building managers can monitor building performance continuously and receive actionable information to address problems proactively. In doing so, managers can get ahead of energy drift, maintain optimal energy efficiency, make facilities teams more productive and protect the organisation against risk and unnecessary costs over the long term.

This is just one of the reasons it is vital that tech such as IBOS is not simply installed into a site and left to run, but instead intertwined with human input, to ensure that there is always joined-up thinking behind the process and that teams operating the service are equipped with the ability to identify and prevent energy drift.

By continuously optimising systems, IBOS tackles energy drift. The tech, which is now installed across more than 9.2m sq ft of commercial property, has delivered £6.5m of savings on clients’ energy bills to date, saving 31,200,000 kWh of energy and preventing 3,400 tonnes of CO2e from entering the Earth’s atmosphere at the 97 buildings where IBOS is installed.

This emerging technology is changing the face of energy management in the built environment.

James Hallworth is head of the building technology team at Workman