Headquartered in Glasgow, global climate tech firm, IES, is an innovator in sustainable performance analytics for the built environment, offering building simulation technology and consulting services across 13 countries. The company has the largest building physics analytics team in the world and has helped to improve over 1.5 million buildings across the globe, including the likes of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and the Dubai Opera House.
IES’ guiding ‘North Star’ is to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and decarbonise the built environment. But the business’ inspiration dates all the way back to the 1970s, when now CEO, Don McLean, first realised that energy was vulnerable.
Growing up, Don lived in a 13th-floor flat with his parents in Paisley. Living through the miner strikes of 1972 and 1974, power cuts were a regular occurrence, and the lift would often be out of service. Don’s mother volunteered his support to neighbours who couldn’t get out and about to go shopping, which meant that Don was regularly traipsing up and down flights of stairs to fetch groceries. This lived experience opened Don’s eyes to the real-life implications of energy insecurity – and just how much society depends on it.
In the years that followed, Don’s realisation escalated into a growing concern that the planet could run out of fossil fuels, changing the way we live forever. Public awareness of this issue was growing, with initiatives like the three-day week to conserve electricity being introduced. Meanwhile, the global population was continuing to expand and the scale of the challenge was becoming impossible to ignore. Don – ever the innovator – decided to make it his mission to help find a solution to the problem.
Don kickstarted his career by gaining a BSc in Environmental Engineering from the University of Strathclyde. In 1979, he then went on to spend nine years in the ABACUS unit in the Department of Architecture, one of the foremost departments in the application of computers in the building design process of its time, undertaking a PhD and Post-Doctoral research.
Don’s PhD work focused on the detailed computer simulation of renewable energy devices. But Don soon realised that the only way to make these concepts and ideas effective within the building design process was to develop them in a fully commercial environment. As such, he embarked on a mission to create a set of commercially viable simulation tools that could design buildings – which play an integral role in the way our society consumes energy – to be more efficient and conserve fossil fuels. This commercial proposition went on to become what it is now IES.
Formed in 1994, IES has a long history of deploying technology to identify energy, carbon, and cost savings across the building lifecycle. Its flagship Virtual Environment technology is today used by sustainable design experts across the globe to create detailed energy models which simulate and analyse all aspects of a building’s performance, helping to inform design and retrofit measures. Continuously innovating, the company has in recent years expanded its technology suite with a range of digital twin tools capable of decarbonising buildings at scale, and across their entire lifecycle. Their most recent release is IES Live, a cloud-based platform that provides real-time, actionable insights to improve and optimise the performance of existing buildings – with the University of Liverpool being the first to make the most of this pioneering technology.
Energy efficiency was – and continues to be – a major driver behind Don’s career trajectory and IES’ work. But what started as an ambition to preserve depleting fuel resources came to encompass tackling one of the biggest – and most pressing – issues of today: climate change. IES’ work is becoming increasingly critical, given that buildings are responsible for almost two-fifths of global energy-related carbon emissions, and it is vital that the sector is equipped with reliable, science-based tools to tackle this issue head on.
Now four decades deep into a career pioneering building simulation software, Don remains driven to explore where this type of technology could go. The ambition for IES is to continue upscaling the application of their technology, from decarbonising individual buildings to improving campuses, cities, counties and countries. Encompassing all aspects of how our buildings perform to ultimately bring about meaningful change on a global scale.
