Feature
Smarter Buildings: Meeting MEES Through Zoned Climate Control By Fernando de la Cruz Quintanilla, EMEA New Markets director at global leader in climate control, Airzone.
Commercial buildings are going to have to change. The UK’s Minimum Energy Efficiency Standards (MEES), which came into force in 2018, requires that commercial buildings have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating of at least E, but this is set to increase to C by 2027, and to B by 2030.
Data from Deloitte1 , however, shows that 80% of London offices
currently fall short of meeting the 2030 requirements. Simply put, changes to MEES regulations are putting pressure on landlords and in turn facilities managers (FMs) to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings, which will otherwise become illegal to let.
Improving energy efficiency in commercial buildings is not easy, especially when FMs need to limit spend and any possible operational disruptions. Assessing HVAC systems (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), which can account for 40%2 of energy consumption in commercial buildings, is critical to improving EPC ratings. A complete replacement of inefficient HVAC systems is therefore one way to improve EPC ratings, but it is also a long and expensive way to do this.
So, it’s no surprising that FMs are searching for a more
straightforward and cost-effective way to reduce energy consumption that avoids the upheaval of existing HVAC systems.
A much simpler way of improving the EPC rating of a commercial building is by retrofitting existing HVAC systems with climate control products that facilitate the heating and cooling of individual offices - or so-called ‘zoning’.
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The heating systems of many commercial buildings currently operate in large inflexible zones and deliver heating across entire floors, or in some cases throughout the entire building. In the knowledge that office occupancy rates have fluctuated substantially since the rise of working from home, with 44% of UK workers3
it’s undeniable that commercial buildings are currently running substantially inefficiently. Entire buildings, or at least whole floors risk being heated to keep only a small handful of workers warm on days with low occupancy, say Mondays and Fridays.
currently operating under hybrid working patterns,
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