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“Display Energy Certificates are a great tool. And automatic meter reading too. What’s not measured doesn’t get controlled.”
David Smithson, Siemens
and produced about 16% energy reduction in those buildings. We did loads of stuff: draught-proofing, boilers, air handling units, CHP. And we know that what we’ve done in replacing of control services and fittings com- plies with the building regs, part L2B. But we want a piece of paper that says that.
David Fisk: Let’s move on to Display Energy Certificates – DECs. Perhaps those in the public sector, where DECs are mandatory, could tell us how they worked for you.
Gemma Wilson: They’re quite a political tool. It also gives a demonstration as part of our programme for rationalising our property portfolio.
Bob Rice: We’ve mostly come out with F- and G-rated buildings, which is a little unfair when you look at the amount of effort we’ve put into maintaining buildings. The problem is we have 2,000 buildings of all sorts of dif- ferent ages, some with preservation orders on them. So, it’s difficult to implement some of the new initiatives and green ideas we have. We’re trying to implement the MACC [marginal abatement cost curves] principle, where we’ll look at initiatives that we can implement, and pick the ones that are going to give us the best response.
David Smithson: Effectively, having to cat- egorise buildings has made you realise that some of those buildings are extremely bad because they are very old and hard to improve, and you’ve both come up with strategies of reducing your building stock and focusing on fewer, more energy-efficient buildings. So, I would argue, it has a beneficial effect. It has focused your mind on doing that.
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John Gilbert: We don’t have the pleasure of DECs, but we did look at self-imposing them across our estate so we’d get an understanding of waste and usage, but also to engage staff. We decided not to do that, and 18 months
ago embarked upon AMR across all of our sites, and that has been really beneficial. I honestly do not see the point of producing a certificate when data is estimated by a seller of that service who is going to over-estimate given any opportunity.
Andy Stanton: I’m a great fan of DECs. There are all kinds of very detailed technical conversations you can have around the edges of them, and any benchmarking scheme can be blunt in some areas, but it depends on how cleverly and deftly it’s applied.
David Smithson: DECs are a great tool. And AMR is as well. What’s not measured doesn’t get controlled.
Tesco, for example, has implemented AMR
in 2,000 stores and has achieved substan- tial, sustainable savings. Once they’re bench- marked, if the energy use changes in a particu- lar store, it is picked up immediately.
Neil Pennell: We’ve all gone through the EPC process and been awarded an asset level rating. The industry invested a lot of time and effort and money in delivering that – and it’s a shame DECs weren’t looked at a bit more closely because it’s relatively easy to do – you get hold of a few pieces of information you can create a DEC. That’s its simplicity. It’s a bit of a blunt instrument though and I think that if we’re going to make it a really useful tool in the future, we need to recalibrate it, providing more incentive for people to move up the grades.
For major commercial buildings that are intensively used, the energy is driven by the use of the building, by the link to its popu- lation, the type of activity that goes on and maybe even its financial GDP. But you can always improve the efficiency, and that’s what DECs give the opportunity to do.
Toby Marlow: In John Lewis we run an EPC on every new project, and our benchmark
IMPROVE WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE
There is a huge opportunity for build- ing owners and managers to reduce their energy bills and CO2 emissions. And you don’t have to move to a new building. Many of the technologies and solutions that have the largest impact can be easily retrofitted with short pay- back periods. There are ‘quick wins’ – finding areas
of inefficient energy use and using exist- ing controls to improve their effective- ness and ‘long term gains’ – examining the return on investment that various controls give you: from simple variable speed drives and window sensors, to full building management systems. The reality is that by following a simple process you can achieve sustain- able savings. Switch it off, turn it down, recycle it and fix what you’ve got and, only when you have everything working properly, think about installing new plant and equipment. This approach is con- sistent with the new European standard EN15232 which encourages better con- trol and use of existing equipment and will be a key driver for future change. But there’s another measure that is often overlooked: educating building occupants to be energy-conscious. There’s a real appetite for visually dis- playing progress against targets in highly visible public areas such as receptions. And when people have this information in front of them it encourages positive energy-saving behaviours. David Smithson
store is just under an ‘A’. We struggle to run a DEC. We had a strong desire to start dis- playing DECs, but when you display an EPC of ‘B’ and then a DEC of ‘G’, the customer perception is going to be confused. But we’re passionate believers in DECs and AMRs and I believe that the DEC will encourage both partners and employees to do the right thing to do our AMR monitor- ing. And every year the DEC is giving them
Sustainable Business | June 2011 | 37
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