Collecting real-time occupancy data
Padurn is developing tools that collect real-time occupancy data needed for implementing the principles of resource efficiency as well as sharing and circular economy inside buildings. Besides reduced rent and energy costs, the benefits of the solution include decreased environmental impact and improved productivity.
Commercial problem: The British Council for Offices stated as recently as 2013 that occupancy levels are typically between 60-70%. This means that on average in office buildings 30-40% of the desks are empty during working hours. A study in Helsinki has shown that on average each desk in an office building costs €9225 per year. Padurn has tools enable the understanding of usage patterns. This data optimises space efficiency which reduces rent and optimises controls strategies which reduces energy costs. Building owners can also rent out their unused space on websites that serve as the AirBnB of commercial buildings such as Eventup or Venuetastic. Also, when companies downsize from 1 desk per person office strategies to shared desks, the new office space usually has a much high budget and specification for furniture. These new fun, colourful and inspiring office spaces have been shown to be more productive.
Societal problem: The building sector consumes 40% of the primary energy consumption and emits 35% of the total CO2 emissions in Europe. The current method of benchmarking the environmental impact of buildings is to normalise the building consumption by building size. The simple reason for doing this is that buildings of different sizes can be compared with one another. The problem is that the influence of the occupancy patters are being overlooked when we only consider the amount of energy consumed and the building size. However, people are now calling for consumption to be normalised by occupancy and this is advocated by the new European Standard EN15643-1. Today an empty building gets a really good energy score. Whereas a full building gets a terrible score and this is totally contradicting our efforts to be more resource efficient.
The long term goal is to change how energy efficiency / effectiveness is measured globally.
