Net zero by 2030 is a deadline, not a pledge: what the mandate actually asks of buildings, and where Occivar fits

I started Occivar because of a gap I kept seeing from the inside of building data: everyone could tell me what their plant was doing, and almost nobody could tell me who was actually in the building while it did it. For years that was an efficiency footnote. With a 2030 net zero target now written into government operations, and the leasing rules that follow it already in force, the footnote has become the problem.

This is my read on what the mandate actually requires, why the built environment carries a disproportionate share of it, and where measured occupancy sits in the answer. I have a commercial interest in the last part, so I have tried to be precise about which numbers are ours, which are the literature's, and which are policy.

01 · WHAT "NET ZERO BY 2030" ACTUALLY MEANS HEREWhat "net zero by 2030" actually means here

The phrase gets used loosely, so it is worth separating the two targets that are often blurred together.

Australia's economy-wide legislated targets are a 43 per cent cut on 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero by 2050. The 2030 net zero target is a narrower and much harder commitment: the Australian Government has committed its own operations to net zero by 2030, known as APS Net Zero 2030. The detail that matters for anyone leasing space to, or servicing, the Commonwealth:

• Scope: the target covers scope 1 and scope 2 emissions from operations in Australia and its territories. Scope 3 decisions come later.
• Who is bound: it applies to all non-corporate Commonwealth entities. Corporate entities and Commonwealth companies can opt in, and many have.
• The delivery vehicle: the Net Zero in Government Operations Strategy, launched in November 2023, sets the actions. It replaced the old Energy Efficiency in Government Operations policy, which is a signal in itself: efficiency was a program, this is a deadline.
• Electricity: 80 per cent of the Commonwealth's purchased off-site electricity must be renewable by 1 January 2028, and 100 per cent by 1 January 2030.
• Fleet: 75 per cent of new passenger vehicle leases or purchases under the Commonwealth fleet arrangement to be low emission vehicles.

Then there is the part that reaches into privately owned buildings, which is where most of the market noticed. Under the same strategy, new Commonwealth office leases of four years or more over 1,000 square metres have required a 5.5-star NABERS Energy rating for both base building and tenancy since July this year. From 1 July 2026 that bar rises to 6.0 stars and the building must be all-electric, heating, cooling and hot water included, with backup generation excepted. Purchases and new construction above $15 million carry the 6-star requirement too, alongside a 4-star Green Star rating.

It is not only federal. The NSW Net Zero Government Operations Policy sets 24 actions for agencies with 100 or more staff across 2024-25 to 2029-30, against state targets of 50 per cent below 2005 by 2030 and net zero by 2050. And from 1 January 2025, large Australian companies entered mandatory climate reporting under AASB S2, with scope 1 and 2 emissions disclosed from the first year under limited assurance. The private sector deadline is not net zero by 2030; it is proving your numbers, annually, to an auditor, starting now.

02 · WHY BUILDINGS CARRY SO MUCH OF THE 2030 GAPWhy buildings carry so much of the 2030 gap

Commercial buildings are responsible for roughly a quarter of Australia's electricity use and around 10 per cent of national carbon emissions. Inside a typical office building, HVAC is about 40 per cent of total energy and closer to 70 per cent of base building energy, with lighting next at around a quarter.

That concentration is good news and bad news. Good, because a small number of systems drive most of the footprint. Bad, because those systems are almost universally controlled by a schedule, an assumption about when people are present, rather than by a measurement of whether they are.

Two things broke that assumption at once. Hybrid work flattened and scattered attendance, so the Tuesday-to-Thursday peak bears little relation to the Monday and Friday reality. And the ratings that now govern leasing are based on twelve months of measured operational performance, not design intent. A building earns its stars in operation, every year, under the Commercial Building Disclosure framework. Design gets you to the door. Operations walk you through it.

03 · THE MEASUREMENT GAP, STATED PLAINLYThe measurement gap, stated plainly

Ask a building operator three questions and the pattern shows up fast.

1. How many people were in zone 4 at 3pm last Thursday?
2. What did the air handler serving zone 4 do at 3pm last Thursday?
3. Which of those two numbers did the other one respond to?

Most buildings can answer the second question to the minute and the first not at all. Badge data gives you entries, not presence, and misses tailgating and visitors. Booking systems tell you intent, not attendance; a room booked for six hours and occupied for two still reads as full. Wi-Fi association counts devices and device owners, which is both inaccurate and, from a privacy standpoint, a heavier instrument than most people realise.

So the plant runs to a timetable, and the difference between the timetable and reality is paid for in kilowatt hours, every day, invisibly. We call the worst version of it shadow vacancy: floors that are formally leased, nominally occupied, and empty enough that conditioning them is pure waste.

04 · WHAT MEASUREMENT IS ACTUALLY WORTHWhat measurement is actually worth

Here the literature is more useful than any vendor claim, because demand-controlled ventilation has been studied for decades.

• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's assessment of demand control ventilation in office spaces put meaningful savings on the table across a range of climates and baselines.
• Case study work across school and office buildings found savings of 20 to 30 per cent in low-occupancy open-plan offices, falling to 3 to 5 per cent where occupancy is consistently high. Read that as the headline finding: the savings are largest exactly where the schedule is most wrong.
• Multi-zone CO2-based DCV studies typically land in a 9 to 33 per cent HVAC energy reduction band, depending on occupancy, climate and control strategy.

Our own working range for occupancy-driven HVAC control is deliberately narrower and more conservative: 8 to 18 per cent of a commercial HVAC bill, depending on baseline, climate and how aggressively schedules are currently tuned. In a modelled 28-day example on a university teaching building, a single schedule change, made against measured occupancy rather than assumed occupancy, avoided about 9,420 kWh and 6.4 tonnes of CO2 equivalent, a 14 per cent reduction against baseline, with no comfort complaints logged.

One schedule change is the part I want to underline. That is not a retrofit, a chiller replacement or a capital submission. It is a control decision that was previously unmakeable because nobody had the number.

05 · WHERE OCCIVAR FITS, AND WHERE IT DOES NOTWhere Occivar fits, and where it does not

We build anonymous occupancy analytics that run on the edge. The short version of the architecture: a compact sensor processes the frame on the device and discards it, then emits counts, density and dwell. No video is stored, none is transmitted, no faces are recognised and no identity is inferred. The measurement travels; the imagery never exists as a record. That is edge AI by design, and the privacy properties are structural, not policy promises layered over a camera network.

For a net zero program, that architecture does three jobs.

1. It gives the control loop a real input. Anonymous counts and threshold events go to the building management system over the protocols it already speaks, BACnet and Modbus, plus REST and MQTT over HTTPS for everything else. You keep your existing control sequences and give them a truthful occupancy signal to act on. That is the whole of occupancy-based HVAC control: condition the spaces people are in, ease off the ones they are not.

2. It produces evidence, not anecdotes. A rating built on measured performance is easiest to defend with measured inputs. Per-zone occupancy against actual plant run-hours documents the demand side of the energy story for a NABERS submission, a board pack, or a scope 1 and 2 disclosure that now has to survive assurance. The reports layer exists for exactly that audience.

3. It catches drift. Ratings are annual, and occupancy moves. A changed hybrid policy, a new tenant, a reconfigured floor: any of these silently invalidates last year's control settings. Live occupancy analytics surface that in weeks rather than at the next rating cycle.

What we do not do is equally important. We do not meter energy, we do not replace a BMS, and we do not model your building. Occivar supplies one missing variable with enough accuracy and enough privacy that it can be used in a government tenancy without starting a workforce surveillance argument. Everything downstream is your controls contractor, your energy team and your existing integrations.

06 · WHY PRIVACY IS A NET ZERO PROBLEM, NOT A SIDE QUESTWhy privacy is a net zero problem, not a side quest

This is the part I underestimated when I started. I assumed the barrier to occupancy-driven efficiency was cost. It is not. It is consent, in the loose sense: buildings full of people who have a legitimate objection to being watched, unions and works councils who will ask what happens to the footage, and government tenants for whom a camera-based monitoring scheme is a political problem regardless of its energy benefits.

An efficiency program that cannot be deployed is worth zero tonnes. So the privacy architecture is not a feature we added for marketing; it is the thing that lets the energy program happen at all. Counting anonymously, on the device, with nothing stored, means the same data stream serves the sustainability team without ever becoming a staff monitoring capability. That is why we made the architectural choice first and built the product around it, rather than shipping a camera platform and writing a policy about restraint.

07 · THE SEQUENCE I WOULD FOLLOWThe sequence I would follow

If you own or operate space that has to meet a 2030 target, or lease to someone who does, the boring order of operations is the right one.

1. Measure how the building is actually used. Four weeks of per-zone occupancy against the current HVAC schedule quantifies the gap between when the building is conditioned and when it is used. It is a small amount of work and it reprioritises everything after it.
2. Take the operational savings first. Schedule and setpoint changes driven by that data cost close to nothing and land inside a quarter. They also improve the twelve months of measured performance your next rating depends on.
3. Then size the capital. All-electric conversion is a retrofit program, and the plant you buy should be sized against corrected demand, not against the demand profile that made a 2019 schedule look sensible. Every percentage point removed operationally is capacity you do not buy twice.
4. Instrument the drift. Whatever you fix, occupancy will move again. Make the measurement continuous so the saving does not quietly decay.

Measurement first is not caution. It is the only step that makes the following three cheaper.

08 · THE FOUNDER'S VERSIONThe founder's version

2030 is not far away. Four and a bit years, which in building terms is one lease cycle and possibly one plant replacement. Targets set in 2023 are now inside the planning horizon of assets that take a decade to change, and the mechanisms doing the enforcing are unglamorous: lease conditions, rating thresholds, assurance requirements.

What I believe, and what the company is a bet on, is that the last third of the built environment's emissions gap does not get closed by better plant. It gets closed by buildings that finally know how many people are in them, and by control systems allowed to act on that number. The technology to do it privately exists. The reason it has not been standard is that the obvious way to get the data has always carried a surveillance cost most organisations were right to refuse.

We removed that cost. What happens next is an operations decision, not a technology one.

If the demand-side measurement is the piece your net zero program is missing, a walkthrough of your building is the fastest way to scope what four weeks of data would show you, and what it would be worth.