Collective action is the only way
CUBE participants met again for a brilliant afternoon of sharing and learning at the Frames, one of the participating buildings, thanks to our co-hosts and sponsors Workspace.
The objectives were clear: to share case studies and collective progress over the past four months, to brainstorm and explore new ways to drive down energy across participating buildings, and, to continue building an open and impactful CUBE community! Throughout the afternoon, we ticked one objective after the other.
In the past four months, CUBE participants have collectively saved more than 7.5m kWh of energy – that is enough to power more than 2,000 houses in the UK for one year! When translated into financial savings, CUBE participants have collectively saved almost £2 million pounds. These savings are expected to go through the roof with the upcoming energy crisis – making participation in CUBE even more valuable.
Workspace in Action
During a building walkthrough of The Frames, currently 2nd in the absolute value ranking, participants were able to appreciate how well designed for energy efficiency the building - equipped with heat pumps, smart energy management system and only running on renewable energy. Emeca, Ariane, and Herbie from Workspace shared that even in such a well-designed building, changing behaviours of occupiers is still extremely important in their sustainability plans. As such, they have organised awareness day and even a dedicated Sustainable Spaces newsletter to keep the momentum up amongst occupiers.
The participants were then split in two groups and put to brainstorm and reflect on new ways to reduce their building’s footprint, whether it’s doing energy deep dives or thinking outside the box with new eco-nudges to drive behaviour change.
Learnings from Energy Deep Dive session
This breakout group focused on the power of deep dives, also known as ’energy audit’, as a way to engage occupiers and co- develop their CUBE action plans. A deep dive is all about understanding more about how your building consumes energy, at a deeper level than utility bills or monthly metered data.
We discussed that there are many different ways to go about a deep dive depending on your overall objectives, which could include the following:
Understand how the building is programmed.
Understand which customers or floors/departments are using the most.
Identify and prioritise actions. What are the easy wins that save both energy and money? What are the things that will take more effort and discussions, therefore might need you to start planning for today?
The analysis can be done over a month or even a year to see the evolution and trends throughout the seasons, using daily or half hourly data. The idea is to try and spot some trends, and work with occupiers to try and explain them.
Andy Mazzucchelli, Energy and Sustainability Manager at Landsec, shared his depth of experience in conducting deep dives for several buildings. One of his key messages was:
"The resources you require to do a deep dive are not only the very technical engineers but also data scientists as well as people who can communicate the data into tangible and meaningful messages to occupiers."
Learnings from the behaviour change session
In this session, we focused on the power of nudges to generate long-term behaviour changes.
Thaler and Sustein have defined a nudge as “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives.”
A nudge can be done through visual stimulation, social pressure and/or fun experiment. So, we used these learnings to come up with different nudges to reduce energy consumption in a building.
Towards action and impact
Participants closed the day by putting what they’ve learned into practice and noting down actions that they commit to doing in their buildings in the next month. We were then able to take a step back and appreciate the growing CUBE community we are a part of and the importance of collective action.
Calling all participants! Be sure to join us for our Mid-Point Candidate Meeting being held in November. Save the Dates will be issued soon.
Interested in joining the community for our 2023/2024 season? Pop us an email at info@cubecompetition.co.uk. Many buildings begin mobilising nine months ahead of the competition.
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