Verdantix released its inaugural Green Quadrant: Building Decarbonization Consulting 2024 report on July 25th. The report provides a deep, quantitative analysis of 10 leading vendors in the space, focused on real estate specialists from heritages including design and engineering and commercial real estate. Our analysis draws on the findings of an 89-point questionnaire, live briefings with vendors, and detailed customer interviews. These findings are supported by analysis from Verdantix market surveys, including the Verdantix Global Corporate Survey 2023: Smart Building Technology Budgets, Priorities & Preferences. Our analysis finds that:
- Strategy offerings are a competitive battleground for vendors.
Decarbonizing built environment assets ultimately requires the expertise of vendors from a range of backgrounds, to manage distinct processes relating to energy use within a building, such as energy procurement, on-site upgrades, and technical installations. Vendors are investing time and money into building out strategy offerings to help customers identify easy wins, build capital expenditure plans, and stay ahead of regulations, to gain market share. All 10 assessed vendors in our study provided evidence of recent strategy offering development, whether through partnerships (such as Johnson Controls), acquisition (such as Schneider Electric’s acquisition of EcoAct), or restructuring of existing offerings into a climate-change-specific business line. The challenge for buyers? To cut through the noise and identify differentiation in a crowded market. - Digital-first service delivery is the name of the game.
Digitizing buildings allows owners and occupiers to identify performance improvement opportunities and track energy usage, thereby quantifying the actual carbon performance of assets. Digital services that implement and optimize building management systems (BMSs), energy management platforms, and point solutions to control specific building elements and technologies play a significant role in building consulting providers’ strategic go-to-market approaches. Providers are also developing tools to overcome data access barriers in those assets that have yet to become ‘smart buildings’; JLL’s Carbon Pathfinder, for example, allows users to manage decarbonization strategies at the portfolio level. - Cost remains the biggest challenge to building decarbonization.
The Green Quadrant study revealed that – unlike in other sectors – the technologies to enable net zero buildings are available on the market today and can be implemented. The greatest challenge for organizations is financing decarbonization interventions; at present, the incentives are not strong enough to outweigh the costs of comprehensively decarbonizing buildings. The market is therefore prioritizing lower-cost decarbonization interventions, and providers – particularly those with an energy service company (ESCO) background, such as Johnson Controls and Schneider Electric – are innovating with ‘as a service’ financing offerings to scale decarbonization initiatives.
Follow the link to access the full Green Quadrant benchmark report, and visit the Verdantix Vantage for additional insights.
