Orkney Islands Council has worked with IES, which provides climate tech solutions for the built environment, to centralise all of its building data on a single platform. The data was previously fragmented across many systems and logins.
The council said it was now able to quickly identify issues and manage buildings from one location, removing the typical challenges that many local authorities face when it comes to grappling with vast amounts of building data from various disparate systems. In Orkney’s case, this is more pronounced as those properties are often on separate islands accessed only by boat.
Orkney hopes the digital twin will optimise operational performance, energy efficiency and air quality across its building portfolio.
The council has already been able to identify where CO2 concentrations are higher than expected.
IES and the council initially focused on seven sites within the portfolio, working with internet of things subcontractor Danalto to gather data from existing building management systems. It has also added heat, oil and electricity meters, along with indoor and outdoor weather sensors, allowing the council to collect more data than ever.
The sensors report back on a secure connection to Danalto’s web service and into IES’s iSCAN cloud-based data analytics platform. This then translates the data into actionable intelligence, communicated via dashboards which can be accessed anywhere via a web browser.
Steven Bruce, the council’s project officer, said: “This has given us a much clearer picture of what is happening across our portfolio. We hope to eventually manage the whole estate from this one system.”
IES associate director Valeria Ferrando added: “At a time when energy costs are at an all-time high and the race to zero emissions is gathering pace, it is great to see our digital twin technology already making a difference to large portfolio owners and local authorities, such as Orkney Islands Council.”
To send feedback, e-mail piers.wehner@eg.co.uk or tweet @PiersWehner or @EGPropertyNews
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