INESS Is Improving the Energy Efficiency of Buildings

COP26 will be upon us soon, and decarbonisation is expected to be a key area of discussion. Strategies that businesses can adopt in response vary, though a common approach will likely be to achieve energy efficiency, and there's a specific target: buildings.

When asked to imagine what a building is, particularly in the context of businesses, vast skyscrapers that line business districts may be top of mind. They consume a lot of energy, thereby making them prime targets for energy saving efforts.

For this reason, a significant number of energy saving solutions cater primarily to the characteristics of large-sized buildings only. This can be problematic. According to an American study conducted in 2017, 98% of commercial buildings belong in the small-medium category. This means they may not be able to tap on the benefits that such solutions can provide.

Soner Hacıhaliloğlu understands this market gap well. He is the co-founder and CEO of INESS, an American startup with a platform that can generate data twins of buildings. Such data twins can monitor a variety of in-building conditions, including movement, occupancy patterns, temperature, humidity and more. By utilising this data, building owners and managers can discover new ways of saving energy.

We interviewed Haci to learn more about INESS and how the startup has designed its solution to fit the specifics of small and medium-sized buildings.

INESS is building the first enterprise platform that creates data twins of buildings. It continuously monitors people’s movements, occupancy patterns, temperature, humidity and other indoor conditions inside commercial buildings. These digital twins use data to improve operational efficiency while eliminating inefficiencies such as excess heating or cooling, unnecessary floor space, and overstaffing.

EM: First of all, Soner, thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! Can you introduce yourself and share your backstory with us?

SH: Thank you for having me. I started my professional career as a project manager at Siemens Technologies. After spending eight years building new technology with the company, I was appointed as a business development manager for the MENA region by E-on Ista Holding. I was responsible for the company’s operations in five countries, spread across three different continents. After setting up operations from scratch, I achieved 50 million euros in revenue within two years.

As of 2020, I am the CEO of INESS Technologies, and we are a company that has been awarded by the UN, European Union and various sustainable management associations for our innovation.

EM: Your first venture was BEAD Technology, before you co-founded INESS and PONS. Tell us what inspired you to begin this amazing journey, and what has kept you going.

SH: Resilience is pivotal to success. I have survived two coup attempts in two different countries, and a financial crisis that affected half of the economy in a developing country. I never gave up and managed to keep my teams afloat in these countries by learning to adapt to different situations. So here I am today, running PONS with my twin brother, and INESS with my close friends, and my learning journey continues on.

I make an effort to try new things, even if some results in failure. But what you will not see me doing is to give up. Because if we give up, we will never get up.

My dreams are my goals, and my goals are the reason I wake up in the morning before the sun comes up. If I wake up before the sun comes up, it is difficult to stop me from making my dreams a reality.

“Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle,” Abraham Lincoln once said.

I cannot agree more.

EM: INESS is described as an after-market, adaptive building management system (BMS). For the uninitiated, can you explain what its core functions are ?

SH: INESS stands for Intelligent Navigation for Efficient Sustainable Structures and our mission is to improve the resource efficiency of commercial buildings in a simple and affordable way.

We achieve this using a proprietary sensor-based system that converts commercial buildings into data sources and creates data twins of buildings. It monitors movement, occupancy patterns, temperature, humidity, and other indoor circumstances in commercial buildings, and uses these insights to improve operational, space, and energy efficiency.

EM: The 2021 UN IPCC Report highlights an indisputable link between climate change and human activity, and the need to resolve our climate crisis. How does INESS address this issue ?

SH: INESS provides an affordable and easy way to reduce the environmental footprint of buildings.

One example where we have successfully done so was a project completed for a major fitness chain. The client was incurring high energy costs across 40 different locations, and it was rising at an unpredictable rate. We analysed data from one of their locations in Istanbul, which consumed 22,000 euros worth of energy per month. What we found was a disconnect between their automation system and the property This led to a system-led inflation in occupancy rates, when the actual numbers were much lower in reality. A lot of energy was wasted.

To be specific, we identified the following energy consumption patterns and installed dynamic measures to optimise energy efficiency:

• Occupancy levels started to rise from 10am onwards. By using our technology, our client gained access to real-time occupancy rates and learnt that occupancy levels generally rose after 10am. Adapting to such findings helped save up to 10% of the property’s energy costs.
• The preexisting system used by our client did not measure energy consumption rates accurately, particularly during night hours when maintenance is conducted. Our technology allowed us to rectify this error.
• As the property had a windowed roof, our technology updated the real-time schedule of the lighting system based on the amount of natural daylight detected, reducing energy costs by an extra 8%.

We estimate that our interventions helped save more than 20% of the location’s original energy costs, effective immediately. These savings were achieved by analysing the building’s energy consumption processes and its level of usage on a real-time basis. We believe the same can be achieved with other use cases.

EM: Cost is a major deterrence of the use and adoption of building management systems, particularly for owners of small and medium-sized buildings. How has INESS dealt with this issue?

SH: We developed INESS to address the challenge of achieving energy efficiency in small to medium-sized commercial real estate. Such facilities have been overlooked by major technology companies as they prefer to serve larger corporate customers. They therefore have trouble justifying any sort of investment in building automation systems, especially if they lack the human resources to operate and maintain them.

INESS can improve the operational efficiency of buildings without requiring costly systems. As a next-generation building automation solution, our technology can provide the same benefits at a fraction of the usual cost.

EM: If you could highlight one unique aspect of INESS, what would it be?

SH: INESS specialises in the generation of real-time data from buildings that reflect the behaviour of its inhabitants, and how indoor environment changes throughout the day. Such information can not only be used to produce valuable insights and monitor energy consumption rates in real time, but also help to operate the lighting and HVAC modules without the need for a traditional automation system. This is possible with no human interaction required.

EM: INESS has joined the third cohort of IoT Tribe’s Deeptech Accelerator programme. How has your experience been so far, and what plans do you have for the next six to 12 months?

SH: We are very excited to be a part of IoT Tribe’s Deeptech Accelerator programme, and surrounding ourselves with people who want to make a difference in our world is great. We are looking forward to our expansion into Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific through our participation in this programme.

IoT Tribe is a community that connects us to the right profiles in the region, and that is very important for us as we look to finish the programme with a permanent presence across the markets.

EM: You are a member of 2hearts, a business community of individuals with an immigration background who work in the technology space. What does cultural diversity mean to you, and how does it influence the way you conduct yourself and your businesses?

SH: Cultural and gender diversity are some of our biggest priorities. Last year, we decided to start an internship programme that prioritised applications from female engineering students and scientists, and our company bylaws state that we will strive to have women constitute at least half of our overall headcount.

The 2hearts community was built to foster stronger ties between immigration communities. Immigrants encounter problems as they start new lives in unfamiliar environments, and our goal is to assimilate them into society through the development of new ventures and innovations.

EM: For those who are interested to partner or support INESS, how can they do so?

SH: We are positioning INESS as a data-as-a-source company that generates data twins of commercial buildings, and we hope to partner with companies that require datasets generated from commercial buildings.

If you hail from the energy, transportation, insurance or finance industry, or have a potential use case for the datasets that we can build, reach out to me.