LDA urges London’s commercial property owners to use toolkit to measure energy consumption
Peta Hodge
28th January 2010
The London Development Agency (LDA) is urging all owners of commercial properties in the capital to measure and cut their energy use with the help of a new toolkit
A drastic cut in emissions from commercial properties will be essential if the target of reducing London’s emissions from around 44,000,000 tonnes of carbon per year to just 18,000,000 tonnes by 2025 is to be met.
“Commercial buildings pump out more than a third of London’s carbon pollution,” said Mayor of London Boris Johnson. “This toolkit can help businesses cut down their carbon emissions and save money on their energy bills at the same time.”
The toolkit has been published by the Better Buildings Partnership (BBP) – a group of London’s leading property owners brought together by the London Development Agency (LDA), with the aim of improving the sustainability of London’s existing building stock and accelerating the reduction in CO2 emissions.
The toolkit recognises the fact that many commercial buildings have multiple tenants who all use energy but have no idea of how much they use, making it difficult for owners and occupiers to work out where savings can best be made.
The toolkit is designed to help property owners measure how much energy a building uses – hour by hour, floor by floor.
Although it is aimed at owners not occupiers, a spokesperson for the LDA said that if individual tenants are interested in their energy consumption and want to reduce it, they should try to get their landlords interested in using the toolkit. “For the energy consumption of buildings to come down, everybody’s got a part to play,” he said.
The value of getting a detailed breakdown of energy use is demonstrated by the case of BBP member GE Capital Real Estate, which recently installed Automated Meter Reading (AMR) technology at its London headquarters, allowing it to monitor energy and water consumption on a half hourly basis.
By making adjustments to the building management system and installing a waterless urinal system, the company reduced electricity consumption by 17 per cent, gas by 42 per cent and water by a massive 74 per cent – resulting in savings of around £60,000 a year and paying back the installation costs within a month.
“This experience really brought home the old saying that if you want to manage something you need to measure it,” said David Short of GE Capital Real Estate.
“Simply by using technology to get visibility on our half hourly utilities consumption and some expert advice on ways to reduce it we achieved significant savings in term of cost and carbon with very little expense and no disruption to our operations.”
The BBP is urging all businesses in London to start measuring and monitoring the sustainability performance of their operations – no matter how basic a starting point is taken. The BBP’s view is that it is better to start at a simple level and add increasing detail over time.
The BBP has also called for the industry organisations such as British Property Federation, British Council for Offices, British Council of Shopping Centres, Investment Property Forum, Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and the UK Green Building Council to come together and agree a set of industry standard definitions which businesses can use to measure. This work is being taken forward by the Green Property Alliance.
Tatiana Bosteels, chair of the sustainable benchmarking working group, said: “It is vital that the tools emerging which help businesses measure their sustainability performance follow a consistent methodology to ensure comparisons can be made across the sector.
“The variety of ways buildings are used make comparisons difficult anyway and without everyone measuring in the same way we have no chance of reaching a common sector-wide understanding of building performance.”
