Boards now ask facility teams questions that used to live with sustainability consultants: What is our carbon intensity per square foot? Which buildings drive the energy bill? Can we evidence the ESG numbers in the annual report? If your answer is a folder of meter photos and a consultant’s spreadsheet, this one is for you.
Start with metering you already have
Most commercial buildings already meter the expensive things — HT incomers, DG sets, chillers, tenant floors. The problem is that readings live in registers and monthly bills. Getting them into one system (manual entry, CSV import or direct IoT/BMS reads) is the unglamorous step that makes everything else possible. Virtual meters fill the gaps: common-area load as incomer minus tenant submeters.
Make the data hourly, not monthly
Monthly totals hide everything interesting. Hourly (or 15-minute) profiles expose the chiller that never ramps down, the floor lit all weekend, the DG that runs longer than the outage log says. This is where anomaly detection earns its keep — a baseline per asset per season, and an alert when reality drifts from it.
From kWh to carbon to score
Once consumption is clean, carbon is arithmetic: grid emission factors for purchased power, fuel factors for DG diesel, refrigerant top-ups from your maintenance records (that one surprises people — a single R-410A recharge can outweigh a month of electricity). Roll it up per building, per square foot, per occupant — and trend it. An ESG score is only credible if you can click from the score to the meter reading behind it.
Audit-readiness is a data-lineage problem
Assurance teams don’t ask whether your number is good; they ask where it came from. Every figure in the report should trace to a reading with a timestamp, a source (meter, bill, sensor) and an owner. Systems with audit trails do this as a by-product; spreadsheets never do.
Quick wins that fund the programme
- Weekend and after-hours baseload review — usually 5–10% of the bill hiding in plain sight
- Chiller sequencing and condenser-approach tracking against design
- DG-run reconciliation against outage logs (and against fuel purchases)
- Common-area lighting schedules tied to occupancy, not habit
- Power-factor and maximum-demand penalties — automated alerts before the bill arrives
Facyliti’s IoT/BMS and Analytics capabilities read your existing meters and sensors, learn baselines, and turn consumption into audit-ready energy, carbon and ESG reporting per building. See how it connects.
