Gridcog, the venture founded by Fabian Le Gay Brereton and Pete Tickler after they sold Greensense to ERM (now Shell) has moved onto calculating the emissions from buildings on a 24/7 basis with a grant from the New South Wales government and a partnership with DeltaQ and JLL.
You’re a building owner who is concerned about the environmental footprint of your property portfolio. You are committed to net zero and purchase green certificates to cover the emissions associated with your building’s energy use, but your buildings are still powered by a fossil-fuel intensive grid.
You eventually want to install EV chargers and electrify heating which will increase your power requirements, and that, in turn, will require even more green certificates, and you’re not sure if your building can handle the load. What do you do next?
Purchasing green certificates is a positive step, but accurately calculating your building’s real direct energy emissions is no easy task. Nor is figuring out exactly where in the power grid your electricity is coming from.
Typically, building owners measure the emissions intensity of their assets by using an average annual figure, which is not an accurate calculation because there are variable amounts of renewable energy feeding into the electricity grid at any given time of day.
A Technical University of Berlin study (which received funding from Google) found that moving from annual to hourly measurements of electricity use results in significantly fewer annual emissions across the entire electricity grid.
To help the industry measure its footprint more accurately, the UN has created the 24/7 Carbon Free Energy compact, which aspires to match every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumption with carbon-free electricity generation.
Building owners and electricity market participants create models to link renewable energy purchases with underlying electricity consumption on a real-time hourly basis.
Gridcog has received a grant from the New South Wales government to complete a project called “24/7 Carbon Free Buildings” in collaboration with partners DeltaQ and JLL. The project is recruiting a small number of real estate asset owners, and will share insights and findings back with industry in early 2024.
The partners are engaging with building owners in NSW during April which involves obtaining historical electricity consumption data, building an understanding of their cost profiles and an understanding of possible scenarios for future electricity consumption, according to DeltaQ principal consultant Steve Castell.
The team will use Gridcog’s innovative software to model and optimise real-time energy emissions, building electrification including electric vehicle charging, distributed solar and battery storage, and renewable energy procurement.
Gridcog has funding from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and was founded by Fabian Le Gay Brereton and Pete Tickler. The pair previously co-founded sustainability analytics firm Greensense, which was acquired by ERM Power (now Shell Energy).
From May to October, the team will develop electricity consumption models and undertake analysis and demonstrate those models with the asset owners in November and December. The model and research findings will be released to industry in January or February 2024, Castell said.
The models are expected to project the impact of changes to electricity consumption such as what happens where buildings are fully electrified and are used for daytime charging of electric vehicles.
“We are working with a handful of buildings where it is relatively easy to understand their load profile, such as commercial offices given the amount of energy they consume and the electrification potential. We have sufficient data around what the energy systems are in those buildings therefore we can apply realistic changes to them,” Castell said.
Once a building’s electricity consumption has been modelled in 15 to 30 minute increments, the project partners can then play around with scenarios to see what happens when activities are undertaken at different times.
This will allow a building to shift its electricity load, which could help to save money by undertaking electricity-intensive activities during off-peak hours or save emissions by consuming electricity at times when there is a large amount of wind and solar powering the electricity grid.
“We can’t shift when lighting is used but we could start playing with the control of our buildings to align with low-emissions times of the day. For example, we could create additional thermal load on Sunday evening during off-peak hours which could then be used to heat the building on Monday morning,” Castell said.
With more buildings becoming fully electrified and connecting EVs during the daytime hours when they are also using lights and airconditioning , curtailment is going to become an issue, according to Castell.
Curtailment occurs when an electricity network operator switches off the electricity supply to a building because there is too much demand on the network from customers, or when a building decides to switch off some of its services because the demand spike is temporarily pushing up electricity prices.
“There is co-incidental demand between EVs and air-conditioning,” Castell said. “The problem is worse in the afternoon because that’s when electricity demand traditionally peaks. We may be looking at curtailment during peak demand periods.”
“I will be interested to understand what the future potentially looks like and to have an informed decision about how building profiles will look in the future and how supply side emissions match.”
With most property companies implementing ambitious net zero commitments, they are increasingly looking to play a leadership role in reducing the emissions intensity of their assets, Gridcog co-founder Fabian Le Gay Brereton said.
“Are buildings flexing and shifting their load to coincide on times when there are high levels of renewable generation? We need buildings to be more energy market responsive so we can have less curtailment. If we can help them become more flexible, then can it help us decarbonise the energy system faster.”
It’s a global movement – with C40 and Google leading the pack
Cities and companies all over the world are signing up to the 24/7 carbon-free buildings compact.
Last October, C40 Cities and Google launched a program to help cities to run entirely on clean energy, leveraging data and expertise from Google, which was the first company to introduce the 24/7 practice of matching every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumption with carbon-free sources.
Some participants have taken this a step further by using blockchain technology to track when and where electricity is being generated from renewable sources on the grid.
Software from a German start-up named Blok-Z can allow electricity customers to select renewable sources based on location and type and trace the origin of their energy in real time.