What can you show a buyer about how your buildings actually ran last winter? When a six-asset UK PBSA portfolio sold to AustralianSuper last December, the answer was Utopi data, down to the share of rooms heated above 24°C.
CIBSE calls the distance between modelled and metered consumption the performance gap, and TM61: Operational performance of buildings sets out how it forms. It sits in operating costs for as long as you hold the asset, and the record that closes it is the same record that explains it to anyone who asks.
Why PBSA Can Close the Gap
In PBSA the performance gap often sits between building design and operation. A building is handed over with a set of assumptions about how it will run, and a standard handover carries nothing across at room level to show whether those assumptions held. Building performance data is what bridges it.
TM61 identifies that split as a main contributor, and its recommendations return repeatedly to information sharing and feedback across the building life cycle. Its companions TM63 and TM62 speak to a building already in use, as does the later TM68. TM63 covers measurement and verification of energy performance in use, TM62 covers occupant satisfaction, and TM68 sets out how continuous monitoring in real buildings turns sensor readings into meaningful information about indoor environmental quality.
So, what does this mean for PBSA? The gap is closeable here, given sight of how the building is actually running at the resolution where it varies. That means room-level readings, continuously, across whole heating seasons, held as one record that carries performance across that break.
One Rating for Thermal Energy Waste
Heating is where the performance gap surfaces. TM61 reports evidence that the engagement and behaviour of a building’s users and systems can move total energy consumption by anywhere between -50% and +90%. That range is at its widest in all-inclusive PBSA, where residents carry no marginal cost for heat, so the modelling is least reliable in exactly the place where behaviour moves the most.
For PBSA, Utopi’s proprietary data set has determined that thermal energy waste falls into three buckets: Occupied rooms being overheated, unoccupied rooms being heated, and rogue heaters drawing kWh outside the managed system.
Utopi Rated™ rates that waste between 0 and 10 at asset level. It is a cost avoidance measure, the value of waste prevented against a rolling baseline, normalised per bed per day so assets of different sizes can be compared. A rising rating means an asset is getting better at avoiding waste. Once the waste is visible, centralised Utopi Smart Energy Control brings it down at scale, giving site teams the tools to close the gap and asset managers a way to assess performance at a glance.
Utopi Rated™ is the asset manager’s number. Underneath it sit four KPIs, the levers site teams pull, and we will be sharing those shortly.
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The Sector is Ahead of the Frameworks
Operators and owners have been closing the performance gap for years, outside of the frameworks, so the account of how a portfolio performs operationally is one the sector has largely built for itself. What has been missing is the continuous record that makes it trackable, evidenced and good enough to put in front of an investment committee. CIBSE makes a related point in TM61, noting a regulatory framework that incentivises design for compliance rather than design for performance. An EPC rates the asset. It does not tell you what the building did last winter.
Across 90,000 connected rooms in 13 countries and 63 billion granular, room-level data points, Utopi has found that the portfolios with the clearest view of their own performance had started measuring for energy and comfort reasons, several seasons before they needed the record for anything else. The regulatory direction across the UK and EU is towards in-use performance, which puts a growing premium on that groundwork.
We built The Utopi Platform to sit alongside that work. Baselining for Utopi Rated™ is now live, with the first ratings available from November 2nd. To see how your assets would rate, get in touch at www.utopi.co.uk/contact.