Energy Data Analytics
Creating an energy data baseline to enable a deep insight into performance and improvement opportunities, essential for successful funding bids.
Deep expertise in energy and sustainability
The pressure for UK buildings to become more energy efficient has never been greater. Reducing carbon emissions and reducing energy costs are now a priority, with Government regulation and investor pressure demanding increased action from everyone involved in a building’s lifecycle – from the initial design and construction through to its in-situ use and refurbishment.
We’ve been working with clients for 40 years on how to make buildings more energy efficient. A major focus at the moment is helping housing clients devise their zero carbon strategies, whilst ensuring residents live in homes that have low running costs, low maintenance and that are warmer.”
How Sava can help
Planning for Zero Carbon
Helping you develop improvement strategies that optimise capital cost, resident energy costs and carbon reductions, tailored for your organisation’s objectives.
Strategic Support & Research
Services range from policy formulation, business development and management consultancy to technical research, report writing and training.
Using our Sava Intelligent Energy software, we work with you to create a high quality, robust energy and carbon data baseline which enables deep insights on performance and improvement opportunities. Essential for successful funding bids, getting a handle on your stock’s characteristics and evaluating energy and carbon improvement options.
Our data analytics services include the following. We will discuss with you the specific services that you require, which usually depends on the quality of your initial or established data.
1. Energy and Carbon Baseline
- You have existing housing energy and carbon data but it resides on separate systems, may be inconsistent and has gaps. It is not yet held in Sava Intelligent Energy.
- We take a deep dive into your data, carry out a full analysis of its whereabouts, quality and completeness, and investigate the availability of additional public domain data. We agree the hierarchy that we will use to prepare your baseline of energy and carbon ratings.
- Then, working with the full range of available data sources, we create a dataset within Sava Intelligent Energy which includes energy and carbon ratings across the whole stock. This can be used by you to implement cost analyses for improvement planning. We provide a short report which documents the process that we followed to create the baseline.
2. Data Quality Review
- You already have an energy and carbon baseline within Sava Intelligent Energy, but it has gaps, too many non-calculating properties or low data quality overall.
- We identify the specific problems, diagnose how they can be fixed, discuss other internal data sources and search for appropriate public domain data that we can add. We then report back to you.
3. Basic Data Enhancement (aka ‘Data Refresh’)
- Where you have carried out housing improvements, acquisitions or disposals since establishing your energy and carbon baseline, we push the new data back to Sava Intelligent Energy so that the dataset now reflects your stock’s ‘revised reality’.
4. Advanced Data Enhancement
- Firstly we carry out a Data Quality Review as in 2 above. We then discuss with you the detailed data enhancements that we can make, and the likely effect on the overall energy and carbon ratings of your stock. At this point you have the option to proceed or not, depending on your view of the likely outcome.
- If you instruct us to proceed, we fix the obvious data errors, import additional data from any internal sources that we have identified, and retrieve lodged EPC data from the Open Data Communities source (or the central register when available), to help fill the gaps in the data. This increases the accuracy of your baseline and improvement plans.
We can provide any bespoke data or analytics assistance that you may require in addition to services 1–4 above.
Once your energy/carbon baseline is set up in Sava Intelligent Energy and is of a high quality, we can help you to develop improvement strategies that form a coherent pathway to EPC band C and onward to net zero carbon. The plans aim to optimise capital cost, your residents’ energy costs and carbon reductions. These plans can optionally be set within the context of your organisation’s corporate and departmental policies for carbon reduction and sustainability. Most importantly, we always work with you to understand your objectives before we create the detailed set of improvement recommendations and costings.
EPC Band C Planning
- Improvement plans can be based on ’fabric-first’ and/or ‘least-regrets’ policies, at your discretion.
- We use Sava Intelligent Energy to summarise your current carbon and energy baseline position, broken down by parameters such as property age and type of heating system.
- We formulate various improvement packages which achieve the objective of moving your entire stock to EPC band C. As well as energy ratings, the results include carbon emissions, running costs and capital costs. The report includes a multitude of tables and graphs, along with a full commentary.
Net Zero Carbon Planning
- Similar to the band C improvement planning above, except we proceed all the way to net zero carbon rather than stopping at band C.
- We can also take into account ongoing changes to the building regulations, the SAP methodology, future energy prices and the decarbonisation of the electricity grid when considering the cost effectiveness and resilience of your zero carbon strategies.
- It is often the case that for technical or economic reasons it is not possible to achieve full zero carbon using improvement measures alone. In this instance there will be some residual (or ‘unabated’) carbon emissions arising from the stock, and the report discusses various options for mitigating these residual emissions.
- In discussion with you, we can optionally research local carbon-saving schemes and funds that might also be used for offsetting the residual carbon emissions.
Using slightly different analytics we can also produce a single planning report which provides a coherent and consistent pathway to net zero carbon via band C, effectively combining services 1 and 2 above.
Bespoke services ranging from policy formulation, management consultancy and business development to technical research, report writing and training. Covering all aspects of energy and sustainability in the built environment.
Strategic support services include the following:
- Support for climate emergency action plans, formulating sustainability policies and ESG
- Assistance with Sustainability Reporting Standard for Social Housing (SRS)
- Rapid-response opinion and advice, both technical and commercial
- Trusted advisor, representative and lobbyist; technical support in high-level meetings
- Technology assessment and advice; technical writing and research
- Incubation support for innovation and cleantech companies; business and market analysis
- Creating strategies for new markets or technical areas, eg. BREEAM, HQM, SAP, Passivhaus
- Programme and project management, including business development
- Review of key policies, strategies, reports and bids
- Bid leadership/management; planning and coaching for bid interviews
- Long or short-term additional resource embedded within our clients’ teams
Featured Team Members
Dr Neil Cutland
Consultancy Director
Neil Cutland joined the Sava team in 2022 as Consultancy Director and is building Sava’s data and energy consultancy work. This is after a long career as an energy and sustainability consultant, specialising in low energy buildings with a particular focus on housing. Neil is one of the authors of the BREDEM mathematical models that underpin the SAP, is a Member of the Institute of Physics and has sat on various Government and related advisory panels.
Following his doctoral research on the thermodynamics of industrial heat recovery devices, Neil undertook extensive performance monitoring of the homes on the iconic Energy Park in Milton Keynes. He subsequently helped to develop and deliver the training programme for NHER energy assessors.
Neil enjoys driving classic sportscars, playing rock guitar and skiing – with more enthusiasm than skill in all cases.
Gareth Richardson
Technology Consultant
Gareth Richardson
Technology Consultant
Gareth Richardson joined the Sava team in May 2022 as a Technology Consultant. This involves working with customers data to recommend processes to clients to help them reach their carbon goals. He is currently developing new consultancy products which will further assist our clients in improving their tenants quality of living, including fuel poverty and zero carbon.
Before joining Sava, Gareth completed his degree in Physics and Biomedical Engineering, and a Masters’ Degree which culminated in designing, building, and programming a portable absorption spectrometer for use by medics.
He enjoys kayaking or playing ultimate frisbee if the weather is good. He also likes playing board games or reading fantasy novels. He was born with cataracts and has had a lens transplant in both eyes!
Sam Lott
Energy Data Consultant
Sam Lott
Energy Data Consultant
Sam Lott joined the Sava team in December 2022 as an Energy Data Consultant. His job is to work with customers to advise on the quality of their housing stock data and give advice on different ways in which they can work towards their zero carbon goals. He is working on broadening our consultancy services with a focus on sustainability and has a keen interest into how we can best advise our clients on retrofitting sustainably and the importance of electrification in the housing sector.
Before joining Sava, Sam completed a degree in Biological Sciences, followed by a Masters of Research in Biological science. This research focused on first time intracerebral haemorrhagic stroke, identifying risk factors that cause early onset and groups that are more predisposed to early onset.
He enjoys travelling in his time off, exploring the globe and different cultures. He loves the outdoors and recently travelled across the US in an RV exploring the country over several weeks.