iKnos Energy links real occupancy patterns, captured through the existing Wi-Fi network, to a digital twin of the building to cut energy use in offices. An R&D project with research centre CIMNE validated it in five Spanish pilot buildings, achieving the targeted 20% energy and CO2 savings.
Buildings account for around 27% of CO2 emissions in Europe, and hybrid work has left corporate offices with highly variable occupancy: market estimates suggest that over 40% of paid office space goes unused. Yet HVAC and lighting systems typically operate on fixed schedules, conditioning entire floors regardless of how many people are actually present. The revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) raises the bar for non-residential buildings, making occupancy-based operation an urgent, largely untapped source of savings that requires no construction work.
Europe’s buildings and energy policy is moving in the same direction (from adding capacity to reducing and better managing demand), with the revised EPBD now mandating building automation and demand-driven, room-level temperature control (Article 13). What is still largely missing is the operational layer that turns these targets into measured savings.
iKnos Energy identifies, hour by hour and zone by zone, when parts of the building are not needed, and concentrates occupants into fewer zones so the rest can be fully switched off. Because workstations are flexible, people simply work from a different zone or floor that day. Comfort is untouched, and the empty space is what stops consumption. The action catalogue includes:
The user defines operational constraints first (e.g. a customer-facing ground floor must always stay open, a department with fixed equipment cannot move), and the optimisation engine only proposes redistributions that respect them. Occupancy predictions allow the closures to be planned and communicated to employees, who are guided to the open zones.
The approach was validated on five pilot office buildings in Spain. The five pilot buildings together cover some 57,000 m2 of office space, from a 120 m2 office to corporate headquarters of more than 20,000 m2 and over 2,000 workstations, all monitored with hourly energy data from the grid operator's open-data platform combined with continuous Wi-Fi-based occupancy measurement.
Beyond savings, the project introduced a new family of KPIs that complement the classic kWh/m2 with kWh per person-hour of occupancy. Two constructively identical buildings can differ twofold in operational efficiency depending on how their space is managed; measuring energy against actual presence exposes this gap and gives building managers a lever that certificates based on design alone cannot capture.
Because the solution runs on the Wi-Fi infrastructure that virtually every office building already has, it is plug-and-play, hardware-agnostic (certified with the main enterprise Wi-Fi vendors) and deployable across a portfolio in days, making it one of the lowest-cost routes to the minimum energy performance standards and zero-emission trajectory set out in the EPBD for non-residential buildings. The quantified, auditable savings per action also provide an objective basis for energy certification improvements and ESG reporting, and the approach is directly transferable to public and private office stock across Europe.
Above all, iKnos Energy supplies the operational layer that Europe’s decarbonisation targets still lack. EU policy is shifting from setting ambition to organising delivery, and from installing more capacity to cutting and managing demand intelligently; the direction embodied in the EPBD’s demand-driven control provisions and in the growing policy focus on reducing energy use before adding equipment. By turning a building’s existing Wi-Fi into an auditable stream of occupancy-driven, kWh-quantified actions, iKnos Energy offers one of the lowest-cost, fastest-to-deploy ways to move that agenda from ambition to execution.
