Building efficiency and sustainability business case

Editor’s note: At Climate Week NYC 2025, over 800 events are taking place across Manhattan and Brooklyn. They all have one thing in common: the buildings in which they occur. Building operations and managing indoor conditions are a central element in the sustainability conversation. Digitalization, plus the right kind of technology in the building space can directly drive sustainability goals. Siemens offers an approach to sustainability for building stakeholders through several tools in its Building X platform.

One climate statistic that hasn’t changed is the fact that approximately 40 percent of global energy emissions are produced by buildings. This begs the question: How do we change this? This is where digitalization comes in. A main goal at Siemens is to support building stakeholders with digital technologies as they make the key decisions necessary to move toward smarter, more adaptable, resilient and more sustainable buildings.

And with 80 percent of the building lifecycle costs occurring in the operational phase, there is a great opportunity to reduce energy consumption and expenses significantly and quickly. Building stakeholders—mainly owners and operators—can harness smart-building data to drive sustainability.

Making the most of that data requires digitalization. When digitalization is paired with Siemens Building X capabilities, the result is greater efficiency that saves money. In driving value to the bottom line, the prevailing technology also derives sustainability impacts related to energy, climate, and resource use. This is essentially the business case for pursuing building-sustainability enhancements.

Our Building X technology fits right into that business case because it is “system agnostic”—building operators can layer our applications on top of their established management system, making for a seriously efficient retrofit. This can be a game changer for brownfields and legacy structures looking to pursue efficiencies and savings system by system, as they develop a sustainability strategy.

There are four key elements for driving building sustainability: Optimizing energy consumption. Acting upon a decarbonization strategy. Creating smart buildings capable of predictive maintenance. And planning through digital twin technology.

Optimizing energy consumption is the new competitive edge

Energy efficiency improvements in buildings are the quickest, most cost-effective, and environmentally friendly way to extend energy supplies, manage energy use, and reduce environmental impact. Using less energy = generating fewer emissions = more sustainable operations. The Building X Energy Manager app enables data-driven decisions, streamlined sustainability reporting, and surveillance of potential inefficiencies.

• Making data-driven decisions with accurate sustainability data:
  Being able to access consumption and emission data in real-time for an entire building portfolio enables easy comparison of energy consumption and the related CO2 and water usage between buildings over time. The Energy Manager app also empowers users to take corrective action to prevent energy-budget overruns, which in turn keeps sustainability plans on track.
• Streamlining sustainability achievement reports and presentations:
  The automated data capture of Energy Manager speeds up sustainability reporting and cost reporting, enabling building operators to quickly build ad-hoc reports—focused on specific locations, metrics, and time periods—for internal and external stakeholders.
• Detecting inefficiencies across the building portfolio:
  The app can quickly spot outliers and unusual behavior across one or multiple buildings, enabling operators to act ​early to prevent budget overruns. They can also switch between monitoring consumption and cost over time and between different buildings. The app’s heatmap dashboard can focus on the consumption pattern of one specific building, choosing the metric groups (heating, water), degree of consumption (high/low), and timelines.

Kick-starting a decarbonization strategy with Sustainability Manager

Sustainability Manager is a tool used to develop a tailored operational plan that can meet net-zero and decarbonization goals. Through the tool, energy optimization and improvement efforts can be tracked, measured, and shown to demonstrate measurable impact, providing data to further refine the operational plan to meet sustainability goals. This happens through a process of assessment, planning, managing, and monitoring.

• Assessing building portfolio performance:
  Through the app, operators can capture utility data from the building portfolio directly from utility bills, including energy usage and costs, carbon emissions, waste, water, and utility contracts. Using dashboards that can be customized, operators can then find practical, actionable insights to plan for sustainability goals.
• Setting goals and plan actions:
  The tool provides dashboards for launching and managing sustainability projects so that building operators can track progress toward decarbonization, and compliance with local and state laws. Having the ability to assess all performance data in one place, monitor the success of building projects, receive alerts, and simplify reporting and communication drives multiple efficiencies that translate into cost savings.
• Manage and monitor decarbonization efforts:
  Building operators can launch and manage sustainability initiatives effortlessly with this app because it enables them to centrally track sustainability progress, access performance data, assess plan effectiveness, receive instant alerts, and streamline reporting and communication, creating operational efficiencies that also derive savings.

Predictive maintenance can solve disruptions before they happen

Smart buildings can make direct use of predictive maintenance to drive sustainability. With its use of sensors and data analytics, predictive maintenance technology can optimize building equipment performance so that it runs efficiently, enabling operators to detect problems early and fix equipment before it breaks. This ultimately helps to minimize the need for equipment upgrades, saving both operational costs and downtime for tenants, while maintaining occupant comfort and preventing environmentally harmful spills or leaks. This also means reducing day-to-day maintenance on equipment, thus reducing the energy and materials needed for that routine maintenance, further driving down costs. This can all be done with our Operations Manager app within Building X, enabling real-time monitoring, historical data analysis, and real-time operational notifications.

• Conduct real-time monitoring and operation:
  Building operators can utilize aggregated operations data and real-time updates of connected sites and equipment to create a picture of expected optimal performance. Within the app the data-point values are updated on-the-fly and commands are processed immediately, down to the building automation control level​. This boosts business continuity through faster response ​time to malfunctions and reduced equipment downtime.
• Troubleshooting through historical data analysis:
  The app automatically logs and stores values and events on all tracked data points, creating a complete data history that is depicted in interactive charts for operators to analyze over different time periods. This can be used to look for anomalies in equipment performance, fluctuations in energy use, and ​building conditions.
• Instant system notifications for operational response:
  Operations Manager can notify operations personnel via email and text message about malfunctions within building systems before anything affects tenants' comfort​. Once in the app, operators can very quickly see the equipment in question, look at the data history to troubleshoot root causes, and quickly make system changes to improve operations.

Building X® Lifecycle Twin enables virtual optimization of operations

Digital twin technology enables users to create various scenarios and plan accordingly. Maybe building operators want to maximize occupancy. Maybe they need to plan for the next 100-year flood. Or maybe they want to figure out how to run foot traffic more efficiently during a big tradeshow. Building operators can do that with a digital twin.

Building X Lifecycle Twin is a digital twin software that creates, maintains, and visualizes digital twins for buildings and infrastructure based on building information modeling (BIM). As part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, this digital twin enables the digital transformation of buildings by leveraging design and construction data throughout the entire lifecycle. Users can create virtual replicas of buildings, capturing every detail from floor to ceiling. This dynamic and interactive digital twin allows operators to explore, model, and analyze building information and optimize operations in new ways to support project delivery, better decision making, and product lifecycle.

• Seamless project delivery:
  Creating digital twins involves overcoming the challenge of losing information between each lifecycle stage. Building X Lifecycle Twin facilitates smooth information transfer among stakeholders, ensuring compliance with BIM information-management guidelines through integrated data and document management.
• Better decision making:
  Our Building X platform generates data that can be used for increased transparency in the foundation of a digital twin. By creating a single pane of glass view, it enables informed decision-making throughout the building lifecycle. The user-friendly BIM viewer simplifies root cause analysis by helping technical staff understand complex building systems and locate affected assets and components.
• Extended lifetime of assets:
  Our building-specific digital twin supports preventive maintenance, planning, and accessing lifecycle data to extend asset lifetime. It also aids in complying with regulations and codes by facilitating the planning and execution of inspection activities in and around the building.

Taken together, all these capabilities add up to much greater efficiency and a greater reduction in energy consumption. Less consumption increases profitability. Such dynamic controls also support real-time environmental adjustments, making indoor spaces more suitable for people, becoming another driver for profitability. When people are happier and more comfortable, they’re more productive. More demand for time in the building leads to greater tenant satisfaction and greater revenue from higher lease rates that bring greater profitability.

Digitalization is behind that drive to efficiency and profitability, and the digital tools of Building X directly support the business case for ever greater sustainability.

Published: September 19, 2025; Updated: September 23, 2025