Creating a design from scratch has undeniable allure. Creative juices ooze easily onto a clean architectural slate. Unfortunately the undeveloped greenfield site or the knock-down-rebuilt, is not where environmental nirvana is to be found. Rather, Warren McLaren writes, the path to a more sustainably responsible future lurks quietly in our commercial building stock.
That they are the pot of green at the end of the rainbow is clear to the City of Sydney, who in May of this year, appointed Origin Energy to overhaul 45 council properties, making them more energy and water efficient. The eco-retrofits are envisaged to cut the city's utility bills by 1 million per annum. All the while saving the electricity equal to powering 870 homes and water for supplying 300 households with their yearly needs.
In the same month the NSW Minister for the Environment advised they would be spending $6.4 million on a program to improve energy efficiency in the NSW public sector, with the intent of saving $5.8 million on government power bills annually.
May was a busy month for Australian governments seeing the writing on the 'spend-and-save' wall, with the Commonwealth announcing the release of more than $20 million in funds, via their Energy Efficiency Information Grants Program.
Such programs stand on the shoulders of similar initiatives that preceded them. For example, the CitySwitch Green Office program began life, in 2005, as the 3CBDs Greenhouse Initiative (City of Sydney, North Sydney Council, Parramatta City Council) before the scheme went nationwide with a reach now estimated at representing approximately 70 per cent of Australia's office space.
Further afield, Britain's Better Buildings Partnership launched in late 2007, targeted at improving the sustainability of London's existing commercial building stock and achieving substantial CO2 savings to support the London Mayor's target of 60 per cent by 2025.
Between 2008 and 2011 the Australian Federal Government's Green Building Fund, made available grants between $50,000 and $500,000 to help fund energy upgrades of existing commercial office buildings, hotels and shopping centres.
Victoria's Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF) established their Greener Government Buildings (GGB) Program in 2009 with the objective of delivering "greenhouse gas reductions, water efficiencies and cost savings to government by facilitating the implementation of energy and water efficiency projects at its existing buildings and infrastructure." In short, by 2018, 90 per cent of Victorian public sector buildings are required to implement energy and water conservation measures that demonstrate a payback period within seven years. Last year the Greener Government Buildings program scored a prize at the Victorian Premiers Sustainability Awards.
Early in 2010, the City of Melbourne established their '1200 Buildings' Energy Efficiency Initiative, which has the grand aspiration of being "the largest transformation in the city for 160 years", creating 800 new green jobs and generating $1.3 billion in economic activity, all the while cutting 383,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, over the next decade, from existing commercial buildings.
Is this crescendo of enthusiasm for commercial eco-retrofits justified?
Local Government Super (LGS), an industry superannuation fund, certainly believes it is. LGS lay claim to having the "lowest energy intensity office building in the Sydney CBD," with just 274 megajoules per sqm per annum. The building has nine storeys of office space, totalling 6,500 sqm. The company was a recipient of a grant from the aforementioned Green Building Fund, which helped cover close to half the cost of the retrofits to their 20-year-old building.
When completed in late 2010, LGS's Carnegie Morgan Hill House at 120 Sussex Street, Sydney was the proud beneficiary of mostly Australian designed green building technologies, including web-based energy and water monitoring systems, electronic urinal controllers, energy efficient T5 and E1 lighting, Power Pax chillers and a Shaw Method Air Conditioning (SMAC) system.
Many of these innovations are world class Australian energy efficiency solutions. SMAC, for instance, last year, won the Australian Clean Technologies Ideas Competition, which now sees them representing Australia at the international Cleantech Open Global Ideas Competition, due to be announced in June 2012.
Local Government Super say the 120 Sussex Street project delivered them a 54 per cent reduction in energy use and 46 per cent reduction in water use. No doubt it helps that LGS "considers climate change to be one of the most serious environmental risks facing the long-term prosperity of the fund and its members," but tucked away in the case study of this project are some figures that should resonate with any corporation paying even cursory attention to the bottom line.
Office work is, obviously, a labour intensive industry, with staff salaries likely to be one of the largest lump sums on the corporate balance sheet. Sara Wilkinson, of Deakin University, Victoria, last year presented a paper at the Management and Innovation for a Sustainable Built Environment conference in Amsterdam. She noted that businesses typically attribute about 85 per cent of all costs to staffing, so a powerful argument could be made for, "healthier buildings which result in less employee absenteeism due to sickness and higher productivity thus increasing the overall profitability of business occupiers."
Instructive then that Local Government Super conducted pre and post development productivity studies concerning the impact to occupants of the above 120 Sussex Street project and the results suggested "an improved working environment estimated at $188 per sqm in increased occupant productivity."
e1 Lighting, a NSW based installer of energy efficient lighting, not only outfitted LGS's Sussex Street office, but were also was involved in a 6 star NABERS Energy retrofit project of LGS's 76 Berry St Office in Sydney. Here lighting energy use was reduced by 66 per cent, significantly lowering tenant and owners power bills. (A company in the USA who manage Light Emitting Diode (LED) retrofits lighting for commercial offices suggest that traditional lighting fixtures consume almost three times the energy demanded by air conditioning.) That "Tenants have also reported an improved working environment," was an additional and significant benefit of eco-retrofitting.
An article published in the Journal of Sustainable Real Estate (2009) makes mention of a similar study where an Australian law firm moving into a 5 Star Green Star rated building tracked their before and after sick days and found sick days reduced by 39 per cent overall, once ensconced in the greener building.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory supported by the U.S. Department of Energy found that "Work performance may be improved from a few per cent to possibly as much as 10 per cent by providing superior indoor environmental quality (IEQ)." Going on to suggest that "cost-benefit analyses indicate that benefits may often exceed costs by a factor of 10 or more."
In 2011, the multinational real estate services company, Jones Lang LaSalle, made some astute observations about the eco-retrofitting of our current commercial buildings. They cited figures from the Centre for International Economics Canberra and Sydney which concluded that, "in Australia, existing buildings account for approximately 23 per cent of carbon emissions."
And more tellingly, Joel Quintal, Jones Lang LaSalle Australia's Director of Sustainability commented that, "Since 98 per cent of the buildings that will be here in 2050 are already built, retrofitting these structures [¬] is currently the most sustainable way to achieve major carbon reductions." The findings from 143 corporate real estate executives surveyed for Jones Lang LaSalle also indicated that "the number of respondents willing to pay more for green leased space jumped from 37 per cent in 2009 to 50 per cent in 2010."
The litany of benefits accruing to eco-retrofitted commercial buildings goes on and on. Like Arup's study which found the addition of Magnetite retrofit double glazing to the Orange City Council's civic centre demonstrated a total energy savings potential of 13 per cent.
One of Australia's most progressive sustainable property managers, Investa, found that over a four year period 11 of its portfolio office buildings achieved on average a 29 per cent reduction in the intensity of energy use, with "technology investments," or retrofits providing half that saving. Their report noted that "effectiveness of technology investments is influenced by the motivation and competency of the building management teams." A reminder that merely bolting on green gizmos does not an eco-retrofit make. The human factor must also be engaged for optimum results.
