The path to decarbonization is not a linear one and it will be different for every building across every portfolio. There are a myriad of factors to consider: building age, end of life equipment planning, hold strategies, tenant move-in/out schedules, fund-level net zero commitments, local Building Performance Standards, rising energy prices – just to name a few.
While not all of these inputs are available in Decarb today (yet!), some are and can be leveraged to craft an Action Plan that balances constraints with objectives. To help you get a head start, Decarb offers the ability to suggest a set of mathematically optimized Action Plans based on available data.
To use this Action Plan Optimization (APO) feature, navigate to a building’s Action Plan and click the “Launch Optimization” button within the Projects section.
The APO feature analyzes your building’s possible projects and, together with information about your building like budgets and hold period, provides three versions of an Action Plan. Each of these three results represents an Action Plan that optimizes across one of the following dimensions:
- Profit Optimized: projects are selected and sequenced in a way that maximizes “profit” or capital invested for a given cost savings over a project’s effective life (minimum of the hold period or the project’s specified lifetime)
- Emissions Optimized: implementing these projects will maximize the emissions reduction for this building.
- Cost Optimized: this option minimizes the capital investment required to achieve any carbon targets.
Each Optimization result attempts to meet any active constraints such as CapEx budgets (if provided) or emissions targets (CRREM or custom).
You can review any of the three suggested Action Plans plus the current plan (if any) and compare the same KPIs plan-to-plan as well as see which projects are included in each version. If you’d like to use one of the suggested Action Plans, select it from the table and click the “Save” button to have the Projects be automatically moved to the planned years.
Please note that the following conditions must be met in order to run the Action Plan Optimization:
- At least 1 Project added to the building
- Annual CapEx budget provided on the Details tab