Energy management in the public sector and education

Universities, hospitals and municipal buildings face a version of the energy problem that is exceptionally hard to solve: infrastructure from different decades, timetables that change every semester and growing accountability for results — while every significant change has to go through public procurement.

Expectations are rising. Public institutions are increasingly held to sustainability targets and to the same disclosure standards as the private sector, and their results are public.

What is needed is a way to improve the efficiency of the buildings and systems already in place, demonstrate the result with credible data, and on that basis decide where to invest next.

Three obstacles that exist nowhere else

It is the ageing systems these buildings are fitted with that are usually responsible for the waste. They run on crude schedules or are operated by hand, with no real optimisation at all.

On top of that, a local authority managing dozens or hundreds of buildings rarely has the visibility to establish which of them perform worst. Without that, every decision about the order of works rests on guesswork.

First, what is already standing in the building

Percee® does not replace investment and does not claim it is unnecessary. It changes its order and its aim. The institution first extracts what control alone can deliver, and then — with continuous measurement of consumption broken down by building, circuit and utility — knows which building, which installation and what scope of work will actually pay back. The capital that is spent lands where the measurement pointed.

In the public sector this has one further consequence. Every significant upgrade goes through public procurement, and quarters pass between the decision and the effect. Measurement data feeds the specification and the justification of the expenditure, so the tender rests on measured consumption rather than an estimate from an audit made years ago. And while the procedure runs, the buildings are already saving — the optimisation layer does not wait for a tender to be decided.

A building that follows the calendar

A university runs on the academic calendar — terms, exam periods, holidays, long summer breaks — and within it on a timetable that fills and empties rooms hour by hour.

Heating an empty lecture hall through an entire term break is pure waste — repeated across the whole campus.

Percee® integrates with academic calendars and timetables: lecture halls are brought up to conditions before a class and shut down when empty. Rooms respond to their actual timetable, not to one schedule imposed from above.

The same principle covers every public building — a hospital running without interruption but with wards of very different intensity, and an office with its own rhythm of opening hours, events and closures. Predictive control adds the weather forecast, and where data from access control, room booking or presence sensors is available, the system matches the plant to actual occupancy rather than to assumptions.

The whole estate on one dashboard

This is where a city or a large university gains real control. Percee® manages many buildings as one system: it compares them against one another, automatically flags the worst performers and makes it possible to direct funds where they will have the greatest effect.

What works in the best-run building can be carried across to the rest. And when a building shows an unusual consumption pattern, the team gets an immediate alert — often catching a fault before it becomes a breakdown or a comfort complaint. Emergency repairs are among the most expensive, so catching a fault early has measurable value.

The estate

Dozens of buildings — and rarely any visibility into which of them performs worst.

A lower bill on the energy market

Beyond scheduling, percee® lowers cost by managing energy in relation to the market:

• Dynamic tariffs — flexible loads shifted into cheaper hours.
• The capacity charge — consumption held below the contracted capacity, with no penalties for exceeding it at the peak.
• Thermal mass, on-site generation or energy storage — used as flexible resources wherever the building has them.
• Demand-side response programmes — where an institution can take part, flexibility becomes an additional source of value.

Every unit of energy not consumed is at once a lower bill and a smaller carbon footprint against the institution's environmental targets.

Reporting and public accountability

Public institutions increasingly have to demonstrate environmental results, not merely declare them. Percee® records consumption continuously, broken down by building, circuit and energy carrier.

Reporting becomes a continuous by-product of managing the estate well, rather than an annual scramble for data.

Why typical building automation is not enough here

Frequently asked questions