Trial / Demo
It’s safe to say that 2020 has not been the year that any of us expected. And while the coronavirus pandemic has undoubtedly dominated the news cycle, it has been encouraging to see that efforts to tackle the Climate Emergency have remained firmly on the global agenda. As the pandemic brought to light a number of new opportunities and threats, many countries began to consider how they could rebuild their economies in the aftermath, reaffirming their net-zero targets in the process with a particular focus on green recovery.
In the UK, for example, the Build Back Better campaign seeks a coronavirus recovery plan that protects public services, tackles inequality in communities, provides secure well-paid jobs and creates a shockproof economy which can fight the climate crisis. The initiative is supported by the UK Government’s Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution which will mobilise £12 billion of government investment (and potentially 3 times as much from the private sector) to create and support up to 250,000 green jobs in areas such as offshore wind, low carbon hydrogen, zero emission vehicles, carbon capture, ‘jet zero’ and greener buildings.
Last month the UK government also announced that climate risk reporting for large companies and financial institutions will become mandatory within the next five years, going beyond the recommendations outlined by the Taskforce on Climate Related Financial Disclosures.
Similar initiatives are being pursued around the world, with the likes of the European Green Deal and the Canada Infrastructure Bank’s (CIB) Growth Plan outlining a shared vision for economic recovery which turns climate and environmental challenges into opportunities.
A green recovery makes a lot of sense – both from an environmental and economic perspective. Sustainable investments — those focused on companies with strong environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) principles — have outperformed their conventional counterparts in almost every month in 2020, even as the outbreak sent markets crashing. The message is very simple, really — companies truly focused on the well-being of their workers and customers are able to make the right decisions more quickly in a major crisis like this one.
It's worth noting that almost 80% of millennials factor ESG into decisions around where they invest their money and with this group expected to control $20 trillion in assets by 2030, it’s clear that current managers need to think beyond simply risk and return when building and shaping their investment process. They need to consider their impact and contribution effects to the various Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a strong focus on green initiatives.
So as governments around the world seek to drive forward their green recovery plans, where can Digital Twins fit in to all of this?
Here at IES, we believe Digital Twins are the key to decarbonising the built environment and will thereby play a crucial role in facilitating a global green recovery. Fully scalable from a single building to an entire city, our ICL technology goes beyond BIM to create a live Digital Twin which responds and behaves like its real world counterpart. Delivering the data-driven information needed to uncover significant energy, carbon, capital and operational savings, while taking account of resource use, transport, social and economic factors.
The Centre for Digital Built Britain have identified that Digital Twins enable better use, operation, maintenance, planning, delivery of assets, systems and services and in the 18 months since we launched our capability, we have certainly seen Digital Twins explode.
We have been working with many local authorities, universities and private clients on various projects with the primary aim of developing digital twins to achieve their decarbonisation goals. However, we have found that the conversation often develops to consider the socioeconomic metrics of sustainable development, mentioned previously, as well as the environmental. Our ICL Digital Twin technology has now been deployed on a wide range of projects, covering everything from creating a positive energy block (or PEB i.e. a group of buildings which generates more energy in a year than it consumes) in Limerick, to tracking the performance and savings of energy conservation measures (ECMs) across a portfolio of campus buildings at Heriot Watt University, and even helping to define a collaborative process to eliminate the performance gap across a number of UK school buildings.
We decided we wanted to take the lessons we have learned from these projects to help make it easier for others to deploy the use of digital twins in their own projects and have a much greater impact. We know we need to rapidly accelerate the uptake of digital twin technologies in order to keep ambitious green recovery and net-zero targets within reach. However, as with any emerging technology, there is still much uncertainty around how to effectively implement Digital Twins within sustainable building and community scale projects.
That’s why we here at IES have just launched our Energy, Carbon & Sustainability Digital Twin Generic Functional Specification to help specify the use of Digital Twin technologies in your net-zero and sustainability projects. The specification document outlines a clear and defined process to creating your Digital Twin – tried and tested by us – along with all the technical requirements and capabilities needed to succeed, which you can tailor according to your own specific goals. Taking the pain out of the process for you and helping to maximise the success of your project by ensuring everyone across the project team is working from the same page to help Build Back Better.
For more information, download the specification or feel free to contact our team today.
