Energy monitoring for sustainability and ESG teams

Purely Insights reads half-hourly electricity, gas and water at meter level, refreshed roughly every 30 minutes after settlement. Non-half-hourly meters come in through AMR, refreshed daily, and supplier billing data, with a manual upload fallback where no data flow exists. Scope 1 covers gas. Scope 2 covers electricity on both a location based and a market based view. Because the underlying reads are actual rather than apportioned, a reported tonne can be traced back to the half-hour and the meter that produced it.

Carbon factors are DEFRA latest published, refreshed annually, so the conversion applied to a given reporting year is the one that year expects. Consumption can be aggregated hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or annually, and viewed by site, building, meter or circuit, which means an emissions total can be split the way the business is actually organised rather than the way the supplier happens to bill it. Historical data goes back up to 6 years where supplier data flows allow, so a baseline year does not have to be reconstructed by hand.

SECR, ESOS Phase 4, an ISO 50001 evidence pack and CDP all export from the same metered dataset, so the figure in the directors' report, the figure in the audit evidence and the figure the account team validated the invoice against are one number, not three. Export formats are CSV, Excel, PDF and board-pack PDF, with a read-only JSON API on request for finance, BI, ESG and BMS integration.

Reporting rarely sits with one person. Access is role-based with permissions per site, group or function, unlimited users per account and an audit trail behind the account activity. A group sustainability lead can hold the portfolio view while a site manager sees only their own building, and the finance team can pull the same consumption into its own reporting without a second data request. Accounts run from 1 to 1,000+ meters, with sub-meters in addition.

The weakness in most reported energy figures is not the arithmetic, it is the data underneath: missing reads filled with estimates, a meter that dropped off the portfolio, or a site added mid-year and never onboarded. Anomaly detection flags missing reads alongside weekend usage, overnight spikes and holiday baselines, so a gap is dealt with in the month it happens rather than during the reporting scramble. Configurable thresholds per meter and sub-meter can be set in kWh, kW, £ or kgCO2e, with alerts by email, SMS or webhook.

Year-on-year comparison is weather-adjusted using heating and cooling degree days, so a mild winter is not reported as a reduction programme working. Site-against-site benchmarking with quartile and outlier views shows which buildings carry the variance. Data is held in the UK, the customer owns it, and Purely holds Cyber Essentials Plus with ISO 27001 certification in progress. If the supply contract ends, the dashboard goes read-only and exports stay live for 12 months, so a reporting year already closed can still be evidenced.

A carbon number that only moves when the factors change is not a reduction programme. Circuit-level and asset-level sub-metering, where installed, isolates what is actually consuming: Purely supplies, installs and owns the sensors, they sit on our balance sheet rather than yours, there is no lease and no capex, and they are returned at no notice cost if you leave. On one published example, a food and drink manufacturer on a single 12 GWh site used sub-metering on three production lines to isolate a refrigeration setpoint drift, fixed it in one shift, and took baseload down 11 percent year-on-year.

Baseload is usually where the first defensible reduction sits. As an industry typical range, baseload runs at 15 to 25 percent of total kWh in offices and schools, and anything above 35 percent usually points to a BMS schedule or always-on plant fault rather than genuine demand. Those are industry figures, not Purely measurements, and your own metered baseload is the number that counts. In a published anonymised example, a multi-academy trust with 22 schools found 6 sites with weekend baseload above 8 kW, reset the BMS across all 6 and projected a £41k saving for the academic year.