What is it about?
New buildings in the UK are supposed to be energy efficient. However, research has confirmed that in operation many new UK prime offices are using up to five times more energy than they could be for base building services. A key cause of this failing is that the regulations intended to achieve low energy buildings secure efficiency in theory but not in practice. This has created a culture of improving theoretical performance instead of operational outcomes, which are rarely measured. This paper advocates targeting outcomes at the design stage using the Commitment Agreement processes that have transformed prime office development in Australia. These include an independent design review, advanced simulation which aims to predict actual performance, strategic sub-metering and intensive monitoring and verification post occupation alongside controls fine-tuning and optimisation to help eliminate wasteful deviations.
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Why is it important?
The ‘design for compliance’ problem is particularly acute for air-conditioned offices because the compliance regime does not require scrutiny of the details of HVAC systems and their controls. There is no attempt to verify/calibrate the predictions of a model through measurements made when a building has been completed and is in operation, and thereby to learn from the feedback and make improvements. By contrast, in Australia, Design for Performance is deployed routinely for larger new commercial office buildings and as a result, the base building energy performance of new prime offices has been transformed over the last 15 years. Australia’s experience suggests that with the right drivers, the energy use of base building services in typical new UK offices could be halved, and best practice four to five times lower.
Perspectives
The UK approach to assessing the energy performance of new buildings is to rely on models which are not intended to predict performance, but produce a surrogate metric connected to the efficiency of a proposed building. For large commercial offices, this assessment does not constitute a satisfactory investment-grade representation of a building’s energy efficiency in operation. In the commercial office property market in Australia, the energy efficiency of a building is determined by an operational energy performance rating and this metric has become aligned with investor, developer and occupier interests. This focus on performance outcomes has driven a systemic change in design, construction and operation of office buildings, with innovation flourishing across the supply chain. As a result, base building services in today’s new buildings in Australia use on average half the energy they did when measurements started in 1998, and the best one fifth.
Dr Robert Richard Cohen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: How the commitment to disclose in-use performance can transform energy outcomes for new buildings, Building Services Engineering Research and Technology, June 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0143624417711343.
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