4 things standing in the way of decarbonising commercial buildings

30-40% of global carbon emissions come from buildings.

The vast majority of those buildings produce almost no data.

That's the problem we have to fix before anything else works.

I've spent the last 15 years trying to solve it. Here's what I've learned about the 4 things standing in the way of decarbonising commercial buildings properly:

1/ Building data is locked away and deleted! In most commercial buildings, the critical performance data and controls are trapped in the plant room, rarely analysed, and often overwritten every 30 days due to on-site-only storage and cyber security fears. If you can't see the data, you can't truly understand (or optimize) your building's performance.

2/ Real in use data is critical when replacing gas boilers. A hospital ward running 24/7 needs a completely different system to a primary school classroom used 6 hours a day with 30 kids generating internal heat. If you only have a modelled figure to work from, you'll get this wrong. We're seeing it constantly.

3/ Electrification is exposing how badly sized most heating systems are. Gas boilers are forgiving. They modulate. You can oversize one by 20% and never notice. Heat pumps don't work like that. Install one into an unmonitored building and you won't know until the bills arrive whether the radiators are too small and the flow temperature is too high: the efficiency has collapsed. Data before the switchover isn't optional, it's the whole game.

4/ The regulatory environment rewards the model, not the outcome. Until that changes, the industry will keep designing to compliance rather than designing to performance. Controls, occupancy, real use, none of it counts. Europe is moving in the right direction. The UK needs to follow.

The technology to fix all of this exists. Wireless. Retrofittable. Installed by any electrician. Collecting room-level data on temperature, air quality, occupancy, energy use.

Buildings can become what they should have always been: comfortable, efficient, and actually understood.

We're at the beginning of that shift. The question is how fast it happens.

For practical insights on decarbonising buildings and making the economics work book a call https://atamate.com/joe