WASHINGTON, DC—The commercial real estate industry has needed little convincing of the business case for sustainable building design and ongoing operations and maintenance. Study after study has driven this point home over the years and by this point the question is not whether to be sustainable, but rather how far can it be taken.

The answer is quite far, at least to hear Aquicore CEO Logan Soya tell it and quite soon too. Aquicore is a locally-based provider of real-time energy management software with a presence in San Francisco, Denmark and Argentina. Soya believes that such trends as Big Data and the Internet of Things are poised to remake energy-efficient building management and the beginnings of this shift--or disruption--will emerge next year.

"Right now it is difficult to get information out of a building more than once a month, but technology is making it possible for a building to provide 200 or 300 points of data per minute," he tells GlobeSt.com.

As these technologies become more mainstream, "the data-driven decision-making and operations will be far, far more important to the industry," Soya says.

That in turn will result in buildings as well as landlords – owners of large portfolios in particular – viewing energy-efficiency as a key competitive differentiator, he says. One case study looked at a landlord that had installed real-time energy reporting support. "Within the first week it identified $90,000 a year in savings," Soya said.

The tools used in these scenarios are the usual suspects: multiple sensors, smart building technology, software that among other things can measure utility bill backs, sub-metering to measure changes on a floor by floor or even office by office basis. These tools can detect small variations in operations that ultimately result in large, or at least larger-than-necessary utility bills, such as equipment that begins running too early in the morning. "Something like that can cost $1,000 a day and it isn't obvious or transparent without the right information," Soya says.

Consider the simple example of the saving that can be had during this holiday week, he says.

On average, office buildings spend about $2.5 to $4 per square foot on energy. A 350,000-square foot office, therefore, may average of $2,000 per day on energy. If a building closes for five days, energy spend could easily be halved, saving $5,000 in one week.