Unlocking Deeper Energy Insight Across The Scottish Courts Estate

Project Context

OCS has delivered integrated facilities management services to the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS), including the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), since 2011. In 2024, OCS re-secured a seven-year contract, with the option to extend by a further two years, supporting 74 sites and around 490 colleagues across Scotland.

The estate spans a wide geographic and architectural range, from modern justice centres such as Inverness Justice Centre to historic buildings, including Edinburgh’s Parliament House, which dates back to 1630. Around 87 percent of the estate is listed, placing clear constraints on physical intervention and increasing reliance on intelligent controls and optimisation.

OCS already operated a Building Energy Management System (BEMS) across the estate, with full remote access and central monitoring by the Energy Team. The purpose of this project was to assess whether deeper data analytics could unlock further performance gains beyond those achieved through established BEMS optimisation.

The Challenge

While the BEMS platform provided strong control of HVAC systems, SCTS faced several challenges common to large, diverse, and predominantly historic estates:

• Energy consumption concentrated within a small number of large buildings
• Control anomalies that were difficult to detect through manual monitoring alone
• Asset performance drift over time, despite established maintenance regimes
• Increasing pressure to reduce carbon emissions and operating costs without intrusive retrofit

The ten largest buildings account for over 80% of total energy consumption. Improving insight and responsiveness across these assets offered the greatest opportunity for impact.

Our Discover Approach

OCS implemented an advanced building intelligence system across the ten highest-consuming SCTS buildings, including Edinburgh Parliament House, Glasgow Sheriff Court, and Edinburgh High Court. 

The system integrates directly with the existing BEMS, drawing live operational data from HVAC systems, asset performance and environmental conditions. Using advanced algorithms and AI-led analysis, the platform continuously identifies anomalies associated with energy waste, comfort risk and asset inefficiency, and quantifies the cost and carbon impact of each insight. 

Insights generated by the advanced building intelligence system are actively managed rather than treated as passive data outputs. They are triaged by the OCS Energy Team, which operates as an embedded extension of the facilities management team. Each insight is reviewed, prioritised and progressed based on business impact. 

Resolution pathways include:

• Direct intervention through remote BEMS adjustments
• Collaboration with specialist third-party BMS engineers, , to amend control strategies or introduce additional sensors
• Clear, targeted instructions issued to on-site OCS FM engineers to address asset failure.

This energy bureau model ensures that insight is translated into action rather than through reporting alone.

What We Identified

Within the first 12 months of operation, the advanced building intelligence generated 280 actionable insights across the ten buildings. These insights highlighted a wide range of performance issues, including:  

• Fan coil units operate continuously, 24 hours a day 
• Air handling units running beyond programmed schedules 
• Pump running continually rather than on demand 
• Boilers running at higher-than-required flow temperatures 
• Buildings reaching target temperatures well ahead of occupancy 
• Minimal differential between boiler flow and return temperatures.

Each issue was assessed not only in technical terms, but against energy cost, carbon impact and operational risk. 

The aggregated opportunity identified included*:

• Over £200,000 in potential energy savings
• Approximately 850,000 kWh of energy reduction
• Around 170 tonnes of CO₂e reduction potential

* A clear and auditable baseline was established using 2023–2024 operational data, aligned to recognised measurement and verification principles, enabling confident progression into design and delivery.

Outcome

The Discover phase provided SCTS with a deeper, evidence-based understanding of how its most energy-intensive buildings perform and the potential of the advanced building intelligence system to drive performance enhancements.

Key outcomes included:

• A prioritised pipeline of optimisation actions aligned with cost and carbon impact
• Faster identification of control anomalies and emerging asset issues
• Improved coordination among energy specialists, FM teams and third-party BMS providers
• A robust performance baseline to support ongoing optimisation and future investment decisions

The programme demonstrated that intelligent analytics, combined with active triage and integrated facilities management, can unlock further efficiency and resilience, even within a highly optimised and constrained historic estate.