Trial / Demo
IES’ Ben Pettitt recently featured in Build in Digital, with an article discussing how landlords can make use of existing design, energy compliance or BIM models to convert vacant offices into homes for sale or rent. Below is an extract, with the full article available on the Build in Digital website.
Typically, when a new building or refurbishment is designed, various forms of digital modelling technologies are deployed, supporting the design process, optimisation of building energy efficiency, and achieving regulatory compliance with energy performance certificates (EPCs).
However, there is a significant opportunity to redeploy these models when repurposing office space and beyond, throughout the building’s entire lifecycle. By awakening a ‘Sleeping Digital Twin’ – that is, utilising a pre-existing 3D design, energy compliance, or BIM model for whole-life building performance modelling – landlords can leverage existing models to support future building design decisions, and create decarbonisation roadmaps to ensure buildings achieve their net-zero carbon targets.
Through identifying opportunities, from low-cost operational measures to shallow and deep retrofit options – such as building fabric, electrification of heating and cooling, on-site renewables, and EV charging infrastructure – digital twins can provide useful intelligence in real-time, as well as help map out the building’s longer-term route to reaching net-zero.
Utilising robust data, analytics technology, and actionable intelligence enables building owners to make the right decisions at the right times about their building to decarbonise.
In a recent collaborative industry whitepaper, IES explored the potential of a whole-life performance approach for designing and operating buildings. Named Sleeping Digital Twins, the paper explores the underutilization of existing 3D design, energy compliance and BIM models, demonstrating how these could evolve into digital twins to enhance operational building performance. Download the whitepaper here.
