Our Investment in SensorFlow
It’s well known that climate change is one of the great existential crises of our time. Here in the UK, the Climate Change Act was introduced in 2008 to create a legally-binding framework for tackling climate change, setting a target of reducing carbon emissions (against the 1990 baseline) by at least 34% by 2020 (spoiler alert: we’re miles behind) and by 80% by 2050.
In our effort to reduce carbon emissions, we must tackle the largest culprits: transport, land use changes (deforestation), industrial processes and the built environment (i.e. residential and commercial buildings).
In developed countries, commercial buildings account for approximately 20% of all carbon emissions, with low energy efficiency fuelling far greater consumption than necessary. Although buildings constructed in 2019 are significantly more energy efficient than the ones built in the past, the fact is that 90% of the world’s existing building stock was built decades ago, and will still be in use in 2050. Therefore, our effort must focus on improving energy efficiency in existing buildings.
Money Talks
For commercial building operators, the primary motivator for reducing energy consumption is not carbon emission reduction. Rather, in the commercial world, the bottom line rules the day; meaning that any argument for change must be justified in economic terms.
Conveniently for the planet and its inhabitants, energy spending is normally a building operator’s largest expense (for hotels, it’s second only to staff salaries), creating a strong economic incentive for building managers to reduce wasteful consumption.
And so really all that’s needed is the technological breakthrough to make energy efficiency in buildings a reality.
Enter the IoT Revolution
The application of emerging technologies to create “smart buildings” has become a hot topic in recent times, particularly since the advent of the internet of things (IoT) era. Improvements in sensor technology — coupled with software advances and significant reductions in hardware costs — are ushering in an energy management revolution. For commercial buildings, connected smart sensors enable massive opportunities for energy waste reduction through the dual actions of:
- Determining the sources of waste, and
- Taking actions automatically and in real time to reduce them.
At present, most commercial building operators can’t even quantify their energy wastage. They lack visibility and awareness because of ineffective, disparate sensors and the lack of analytics that can provide actionable insights. What’s more, energy efficiency is an ongoing concern that requires constant monitoring and action taking, whereas the industry standard is to conduct annual audits (if they do anything at all). Even when building managers understand required steps to reduce wastage, execution is often ineffective since it relies on slow, error-prone human operators to take those actions.
Enter SensorFlow
When we did our deep dive into the energy management market, we came across Singapore-based EF company SensorFlow, founded by the incredibly talented Sai and Max.
We were immediately taken in by the company’s lofty ambitions to use IoT technology to massively reduce energy consumption in commercial buildings; a market of around USD400bn annually, of which it is estimated that 30% is wastage.
The company has built a proprietary full stack IoT platform — comprising connected wireless sensors — that allow for automated analysis and decision making. It understands when a room is unoccupied and can automatically adjust the climate to reduce energy usage, removing the need for slow and inefficient human involvement in the process.
The initial focus is hotels in South East Asia, however strong performance in the last six months and significant inbound interest means expansion beyond the region sooner than anticipated.
The company has already shown energy savings of up to 30% with some of their clients; a true game-changer in an industry where profit margins rarely exceed 15% per room.
Conclusion
We’re super excited to have teamed up with SensorFlow. On a personal note, I’m honoured to have joined the board and really enjoy supporting Sai and Max as they realise their dream of saving us all from climate change doom 😬
