Copilot supports corporate sustainability compliance
26th December 2023
FRANCE: A subsidiary of certification company Eurovent is developing a new service to help companies comply with the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).
The new CSRD, which will apply progressively from 1 January, requires European companies to be more rigorous and transparent about their sustainable development actions.
For buildings and property holdings, this means that they must provide much more precise and detailed non-financial reporting on their environmental quality and energy efficiency. The information must be reliable and justified, as it is checked by a statutory auditor or an independent body to ensure that it is in line with the EU’s criteria and taxonomy.
This compulsory, complex system applies to HVAC equipment, which accounts for the largest share of energy consumption in buildings.
A company will no longer be able to simply claim that it has reduced its carbon footprint by optimising the HVAC installations in its buildings or say that they are all already very energy efficient. It will have to prove it and measure it financially.
“An on-site audit of the HVAC system in several buildings can be a lengthy and costly procedure, which can turn some customers off,” said Yannick Cotrelle, chair of Copilot, a company founded by Eurovent Certita Certification, German engineering and software firm Synavision and European HVAC associations’ group REHVA.
“We have the expertise and the necessary accreditation – ISO 17065 – to measure the energy efficiency of a building’s HVAC system, identify potential improvements, and put a financial figure on the impact of an investment designed to improve the building’s energy efficiency,” Cotrelle explained.
Copilot offers two services carried out by independent auditors:
Certification of HVAC systems (Duo Diligence) helps to identify the areas for improvement, troubleshoot problems, to carry out predictive maintenance or to compare buildings in a property portfolio;
Commissioning – the verification, uses the specific protocols of Copilot, of the conformity of the conception, the installation, and the operation of HVAC system to the owner’s objectives when the building is brought into service.
Copilot archives certified projects to ensure that technical documentation remains available over time.
“In partnership with Synavision, we have developed a digital building audit solution to minimise the time and cost involved. The customer provides a simple data export from their BMS and we carry out the audit using our software tools, extracting or supplying the missing data requested by the CSRD reporting,” Yannick Cotrelle explained.
“Because we don’t have to go on site, we can audit a company’s entire property portfolio, whether in France or abroad. We save a lot of time, because we can do in less than a week what would normally take more than a month.”
Copilot can also validate the efficiency of the buildings to check that it corresponds to the real needs of the building, to certify the accuracy of the data and to validate the value of the investments envisaged to improve the environmental performance of the business/customer.
It is expected to take between two weeks and one month to complete the audit, depending on the size of the property. The overall cost of the service is around €10,000 for a property portfolio.
