10116943Accelerating Decarbonisation of the Built Environment with AIClosedCR&D BilateralInnovate UKCarbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from human activities are one of the most important factors in causing climate change. [][0] 11% of global emissions (\>3.7GtCO2/year) come from the operation of non-domestic buildings \[UNEP, 2022; IPCC, 2022\] such as offices, shops and hospitals. The most sustainable and efficient solution is adapting existing building and districts for energy efficiency, e.g. through * Replacing fossil fuels with district thermal systems; * Installing renewable energy generation and storage; * Upgrading building fabric (windows/insulation). These adaptations are known as retrofitting. However, the current retrofitting rate is too slow. By 2030, \>70% of the 1.5 million non-domestic buildings in the UK will not comply with the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES), exposing property owners to significant fines and putting 2050 NetZero commitments at risk. The bottleneck in retrofitting is identifying and planning the most effective measures for each building and district because planning is conducted through onsite assessment by human analysts. There simply aren't enough analysts to cover all non-domestic sites quickly enough; moreover, humans cannot optimise hundreds of potential elements to consider. In this international, collaborative project UK SME Building Atlas, Swiss SME Sympheny and Swiss Federal Laboratory Empa join forces to Accelerate Decarbonisation of the Built Environment with AI. The recent wide adoption of smart meters means energy usage can be measured over time intervals as short as five minutes, allowing deep insight into energy consumption dynamics and vastly improving the accuracy and impact of retrofit recommendations at scale. This project uses cutting-edge AI to ingest this data, model the effectiveness of energy-efficient retrofit measures and output recommendations at the touch of a button. In collaboration with all partners, Empa will optimise the modelling, which will then be trained by each industrial partner on data for their own customer-type. Additionally, this project brings together expertise on individual building retrofits (Building Atlas) and district-level energy planning (Sympheny). The innovative and cross-integrated outputs of the project enable a step-change in decarbonisation planning by creating a new-to-the-world capability to find solutions encompassing individual builds, groups of buildings and district energy-supplies. This project will yield immediate real world impact on completion, deployable within the Sympheny and Building Atlas platforms already delivering for existing customers (local councils, commercial real-estate and energy utilities) and rapidly gaining traction for new customers, in UK and Europe. We forecast CO2 reduction of 37mT by 2028: equivalent to one-third total UK domestic transport emissions. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide