Keeping up with Climate Tech vol. 2

How many times in the past month have you left the lights in your room on? What about leaving the fan on? Leaving the tap running for the full time you’re brushing your teeth? We often brush these small actions under the carpet. How much could one individual’s actions impact the carbon footprint of the buildings we inhabit, work in, or visit anyways?

It turns out that buildings are the largest carbon emitters, responsible for 39% of the world’s emissions. In the quest to make the world greener, we must prioritize making our buildings more sustainable.

This is exactly what Infogrid, a smart building solutions company with presence in the UK and US, is working toward. 

Kate Henningsen, CEO of Infogrid, joined the company after serving as COO of Arcadia, the climate tech startup she co-founded. 

“We had a mutual board member between Arcadia and Infogrid who shared they were looking for a CEO, so that was the impetus,” she said in an interview with the Harvard Technology Review. “I’m a sustainability person, so this was exciting for me. I also have conviction that buildings have to play a pretty big role in a decentralized grid, so they have to be the balancers of a supply and demand grid that’s becoming much more dynamic with renewable energy and distributed generation.” 

For Henningsen, the shift to Infogrid, which is originally a UK startup which acquired a US company, helped her understand how the European and American startup scenes differed.

“There’s the same number of startups in the early stages in both Europe and the US, but your revenue multiple in Europe gets smaller quicker,” she explained. “This then leads to an interesting cycle of lower earnings and lower valuation. The innovation is the same as in the US. For us at Infogrid, we can bring a US understanding of the market to Europe, which oftentimes is less saturated, because there are just fewer startups that get to scale — that’s the positive side of the equation.”

Making the built environment more sustainable is no easy task. Commercial buildings — Infogrid’s main area of focus — have many interdependent systems dependent on different actors, unlike a residential unit with a single thermostat.

“There’s not a lot of data software that exists to help you understand what’s happening in commercial buildings. You have to digitize the data first, and then understand it,” Henningsen noted. “Then you write software to deal with that data. You have to factor in many of the machines that aren’t operating within parameters. If an air handling unit is operating two degrees below normal, how should the air handling unit two floors below it start to work in order to compensate for that? There’s a complication of the variables.”

And that’s just the technical challenges. Optimizing building sustainability involves multiple stakeholders — owners, operators, facility managers, and contractors — each with their own interests and constraints. This layered decision-making slows down implementation since there is no straightforward purchasing path like in typical tech adoption.

Infogrid adds the most value in large commercial projects like the Carolina Panthers Stadium because of these complicating factors and the sheer number of machines that need to be coordinated.

“Another factor we consider is variability of use,” she added. “If the building is used differently Sunday at 8pm versus Tuesday at 7pm, we need to factor that into how we train our models. A way we get this data is through occupancy sensors or keycard access numbers, and we feed that as an additional layer into the system.”

Henningsen said “dynamism equals arbitrage” in situations of variable use. That is, a dynamic building system that can quickly respond to performance variances could capture small but impactful carbon efficiencies in real-time. 

Given the sheer complexity of building sustainability, it makes sense that InfoGrid offers several products to tackle various aspects of the issue. 

Here’s a breakdown of Infogrid’s products:

1. An energy reporting tool that uses AI to aggregate energy usage data, streamline compliance reporting, and quickly calculate carbon footprint. 
2. An energy reduction tool that builds a plan specific to a client’s needs that will help them save as much money as possible. The tool also allows the client to track progress toward the goal, work across teams, and measure and report impact.
3. A pipe monitoring tool to reduce water waste and save on monthly energy bills with remote pipe monitoring and microbe detection.
4. A smart cleaning tool that prevents wastage of water and makes the cleaning process especially in large commercial buildings much more efficient.

Henningsen compared Infogrid’s suite of solutions to Arcadia’s.

“Arcadia collects global utility data that can be piped to different companies and used in different ways,” she said. “In the US, you have so much siloed energy data, so if you want to build a business with it, you need a horizontal platform that goes across all 6500 utilities. It’s incredibly valuable. Infogrid is a bit more narrow in its scope, in a way. We do access Arcadia’s data — so I still get to work with one of my babies — but we have a more defined ICP, or ideal customer profile, of people who are running commercial buildings. This helps us in creating solutions directly to impact their daily lives and work.”

Each of Infogrid’s products uses AI in a unique way to tackle a dimension of building sustainability. 

“Across our solutions, what we’re really doing is finding patterns of interconnection between machines, and key to that is identifying more quickly what machines are working and not working,” Henningsen noted. “But we’re also using AI to look historically at ten years of data over 600 million square feet to determine what actions have led to the most results and savings.”

Two products that might surprise those who look initially at Infogrid’s website are the pipe monitoring and smart cleaning tools. 

60% of the operating dollar for commercial buildings goes to cleaning or energy. Infogrid saw many clients dealing with both problems, so decided to make the most of the opportunity.

“Our cleaning solution is an occupancy based product, so you’re putting in sensors to then tell people when the space has been used,” Henningsen explained. “ The cleaning product is in line with our larger goal of being able to better understand how a building is being used and how you could run the building better. The end result of this is two different products that cover a majority of the wallet spend for commercial real estate companies, but that are linked in their goal to reduce energy use and spending.

Pipe monitoring has a similar impact. Buildings are cooled mostly through water (boiler systems and HVAC systems all run on circulating water). This makes effective use and circulation of water crucial for building efficiency.

“This tool also goes along with energy efficiency,” Henningsen said. “Right now, our pipe monitoring product is mainly being used to understand water flow and temperature, so we can detect leaks and make compliance reporting easier. In the medium term, this will be key to understanding the efficiency and operations of a building. In the UK, they require people to run their faucets for some time every day to prevent buildup. Our tool removes the need to do that because you can basically prove your water is fine using your data.”

Looking to the future, Infogrid hopes to work to further consolidate their Independent Data Layer and centralize all the different types of data in the building in a mapped, easy to use, controlled fashion. And the second goal they have in the short term is to continue fine-tuning their models to optimize savings for customers.

“Another goal we have for the far future state is being able to ‘call’ a megawatt of power from a building, and the building will be able to curtail power on demand,” Henningsen said. “We’re in the market with this in some malls in California, but it’s still really early stages. In the long run, if we’re able to cut building emissions by 30-50% we will be able to cut down our congestion.”