At EnergyElephant, the main goal of our product development is to provide solutions to energy and carbon data management issues that exist for a range of different customer types and contexts. Our team places a high level of importance on simple UX design to develop interfaces and interactions that create intuitive, engaging, and user-friendly experiences. New feature testing is done with a cohort of users who represent a cross-section of our customer base.
In late 2024, we invited a select group of customers – several early adopters and active users of our platform – to participate in the testing of new decarbonisation planning tools that we have designed to help users:
- Visualise the energy performance of buildings per unit floor area/other metric, which can be used to compare the relative efficiency of similar types of buildings across a portfolio.
- Visualise multi-year trends in energy consumption and emissions at a monthly and annual granularity.
- Use historic carbon data to calculate the projected impact of aspirational emission-reduction targets and potential emission-reducing actions, showing how changes in energy consumption from different sources contribute to the overall trajectory.
- View the expected costs or savings from various emission-reducing actions using a Marginal Abatement Cost Curve, along with the amount of emissions each action could potentially reduce.
- Set emission-reduction and energy efficiency targets to guide project planning goals, and list emission-reducing actions under consideration or implementation.
- View projects for the entire organisation or for individual assets or asset groups, and track progress of each project including those completed, in implementation, in planning, or being considered.
In early 2025, after several months of testing, we lifted the feature flag. The Decarbonisation Projects section of our platform can now be accessed by all EnergyElephant users to:
- Set aspirational emissions-reduction targets, with separate targets for particular assets or organisational divisions as necessary.
- Record a set of potential emission-reducing actions, and – using the analysis tools – leverage the underlying utility and emissions data to evaluate the relative impact of the opportunities so the most advantageous strategy can be applied.
- Decentralise ownership of sustainability initiatives and decarbonisation projects across different business units to promote a culture of shared responsibility and drive behavioural change.
- Track progress for the implementation of each opportunity, ensuring the project stays on its target trajectory, being completed within budget and on time.
If you’d like to see these game-changing tools in action (or just the user-friendliness of our platform in general), come along to Stand G78 (hint: look out for the elephant in the room!).
Pre-event tip: If you’re in the market for a sustainability management system, we know how much time and effort it can take to find the right software vendor to meet your unique business needs. Exhibitions are a great place to start, but it can be difficult to know exactly what questions to ask. To make your life easier, we’ve put together a free guide that you can read in advance. Not only does it detail the similarities and differences between four of the most relevant software categories under the broad Energy and Sustainability/ESG umbrella, but it also contains a sample list of around 80 questions, along with expert advice on what to look for in a response. You can download the PDF here.