A BRIGHT future – Sonae Sierra develops a brighter model for energy efficiency

Energy use constitutes a major environmental and economic impact for retail real estate owners and investors. But while assets may have similar designs and characteristics, actual performance and energy use can vary significantly between assets and equipment.

Knowing how energy is being consumed is key to understanding how these variations occur and identifying where the most effective changes should be made. Factors including energy systems, infrastructure, layout, design, operations, climate, and weather all have an influence, so detangling these factors is a complex task that none in the market could provide.

Although Sonae Sierra has been continuously improving its energy intensity since 2002, there have often been behaviours in the energy performance that could n ot be explained by local factors such as size, climate and opening hours.

As a result, Sonae Sierra began looking for a tool that offered the level of detail and analysis that would explain the variation between an asset’s optimal energy consumption, and its actual consumption. Having found that no solution was available on the market that offered the sophisticated insight Sonae Sierra needed, we decided to create our own tool.

Bright® is a modelling tool which allows us to analyse the energy consumption of real estate assets against a theoretical simulation, identifying technical improvements and enhancing management practices.

By comparing the optimal energy consumption (assessed by the tool), with the real one, and comparing assets within a portfolio, investors can for example determine the ones that have high consumptions due to outdated systems, poor management practices or unavoidable factors.

Therefore, clients gain valuable data that can be used to inform and shape decision-making, allowing them to assess the assets towards which the efforts should be driven.

By trialling the tool across Sonae Sierra’s own portfolio of shopping centres it allowed us test and refine it on the most complex type of assets, which allowed us to establish as leaders in the provision of energy efficiency solutions across all building types from the most simple to the most complex and intricate.

Bright® is suited to all types of buildings and it takes a holistic approach looking at every aspect of a real estate asset’s operation. However, this casestudy is focused on the results from Bright® implementation.

The process of developing Bright® has ended up unveiling a huge potential to improve energy efficiency and reduce costs across our clients’ portfolios.

• 292 energy optimisation measures across 28 assets.
• 218 of these measures implemented enable to avoid annually 21,400,000 kWh of electricity, equivalent to €2.8 million in costs and around 5,700 tonnes of CO₂e.
• Implemented measures required a total investment of €2.7 million.
• 51% of the actions implemented were quick wins. €0.22 million invested on these quick-wins generated €1.05 million, 38% of all potential savings of the project.
• In 2018 Bright® was awarded a Silver Stevie® Award in the “Energy Industry Innovation of the Year” in the 15^th Annual International Business Awards®.