A sustainable future for London's buildings

Growing awareness of environmental issues is now prompting many organisations to review their impact on the planet. London based environmental consultants, Carbon Descent are all too aware of their responsibilities in this field and are dedicated to providing a sustainable future for the capital. A second KTP project with London South Bank University means Carbon Descent can streamline their environmental audits which aim to reduce the carbon footprint of their client organisations.

A KTP with LSBU has developed an environmental assessment tool, BluePrint, that allows them to record, analyse and make recommendations to clients on the energy use of the buildings.

“During the last KTP, European legislation, the ‘Energy Performance in Buildings Directive,’ was introduced, essentially requiring carbon emissions to be monitored and reduced,” Managing Director of Carbon Descent, Chris Dunham stated, “with that in mind, we saw this particular directive as a real business opportunity.”

Typically all data capture audits were done on paper, a time consuming and expensive process. With this new software Carbon Descent can make recommendations more efficiently, more cheaply and ultimately provide more assessments to more organisations.

“Carbon Descent embarked on developing this tool with an eye on the changing regulations for reporting energy use in buildings. Now that it is ready for release to the market it is obvious that energy auditing is becoming one of the most important actions for reducing carbon emissions in buildings,” stated Professor Tony Day, LSBU academic working on this KTP project.

KTP Associate Julie Allen combined her skills in both Energy and Environmental Studies and IT to develop BluePrint. “Bringing my skills together to develop this product has created a niche product and a new market for the company that didn’t exist before,” comments Julie. This new tool will assist building assessors in collecting raw data on energy usage, water consumption and waste production on a hand-held device on site, upload it remotely onto a central database, analyse the data, and finally using the reporting facility to make tailored recommendations to customers.

Chris is very excited about the prospects of this new tool. “This is a fantastic piece of software which enables us, and anyone who buys it, to do energy and environmental audits in a streamlined, consistent and accurate manner. It also adds another product to our software suite that we can sell on.” Chris goes on to say “we have already started selling this product which is a measure of just how in demand it is, we also have a number of people waiting to buy it. The financial benefits are also coming into fruition and we can clearly see that this year we are going to make significant sales from this software.”

Carbon Descent does not have the development skills in-house to develop such a specialist product and so working alongside LSBU academic supervisors, Professor Tony Day and Phil Jones has been paramount. “The product developed is unlike anything that exists in the buildings market and provides a huge step forward in making on-site audits a much more effective and efficient process, improving accuracy, speed and reducing costs,” comments Phil.