PlanIT Impact helps real estate owners, operators, and investors to design, build, and maintain buildings that have reduced carbon impact. In fact, the company’s mission is to create “a carbon neutral built environment.”
Founded by Dominique Davison, a founding principal of DRAW Architecture + Urban Design, PlanIT Impact provides building analytics that deliver insights into items like energy, stormwater, and water to create sustainable buildings. The software platform can quickly assess the impact that a building has on the environment and strives to optimize savings for their construction and property management customers. For example, PlanIT Impact’s Energy Discovery Engine helps customers set energy use goals and create a digitized strategy to increase energy savings and minimize building costs. Similarly, the company’s Water module provides water usage scenarios which can be used as part of the building design process.
The platform is not only for assessing single building assets. PlanIT Impact is a way for asset managers and owners to assess performance of their entire building portfolios. For example, if the user has a goal to reduce their carbon footprint across an entire portfolio, it has historically been very difficult to strategize how to do that holistically, rather than building by building. PlanIT Impact helps users decide how to allocate investment to achieve targeted goals across entire portfolios.
Why are sustainable buildings important?
First - Buildings represent around 40% of both global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions1. Second, there are many aspects to a building that are associated with energy use and carbon emissions - see the visual below based on a recent report from the International Energy Agency.
Building energy consumption comes from space heating, water use, cooking, appliances, space cooling, and lighting. And different buildings have different distribution of energy use which makes designing and constructing energy efficient buildings more complex. While air conditioner use for space cooling is not a big component of energy consumption in residential buildings, there are estimates that suggest that AC accounts for 40% of commercial or non-residential buildings’ energy consumption.
Expertise is required for each of the above areas identified as a source of building energy consumption. One area that is making progress is lighting. Sales of LED lights are increasing and becoming more mainstream. It is expected that LED lights will overtake fluorescent lights as the dominant lighting technology in the next few years2.
Innovations like PlanIT Impact and others can help mitigate and reduce building energy use and carbon emissions. And overtime, they are important for transforming the overall real estate industry.
Additional FREE resources (requires simple email sign-up):
Learn more about PlanIT Impact and how it helps create sustainable buildings by watching the company's presentation at our June 2021 ‘Startups Driving Sustainability’ Showcase recording.
You can also learn more by listening to The Understory Podcast episode featuring PlanIT Impact.
[1] Global Alliance for Building & Construction, JP Morgan European Equity Research (2020)
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