The Power of Good Advice
Watts-ON Consultant has recently delivered an energy audit for a late ESOS submission for a company that operates in shared office block in the City of London.
The challenges in identifying viable energy savings for organisations that operate in this type of rented spaces are very common.
A good chunk of the energy charged to renters in office blocks is used by shared building services, usually operated by facility management companies that have little or no incentive to operate HVAC to the highest possible efficiency.
This is because they focus on reducing complaints, rather than spending time and effort on the optimisation of HVAC control or the upgrade of the building services infrastructure to improve flexibility for the control of internal environmental conditions, such as heating, lighting and so on.
Furthermore as the FM team does not pay for the energy that can be recharged to the tenants, the incentive to reduce consumption is simply not there as the ROI would be for the tenants advantage.
For this particular project Watts-ON had the luxury of working alongside a collaborative FM team that was willing to make available the shared building services facilities and the BMS system that controls these.
Upon inspection we were reassured to find a good level of energy management practice in the operation with the HVAC system and a modern system.
Yet there were still opportunities, by reviewing the BMS we could see that some of the sensors were reporting incorrect values ( for example 2m3/s of fresh air in a 50K+ m2 office building), unmanaged fresh air dampers not linked to internal air quality levels and poor dT across the heating system.
We also spotted a missed opportunities to recover waste heat from the cooling system to pre-heat the return water from the heating distribution system.
Despite diverging priorities between FM companies, landlords and the building occupiers to reduce energy consumption, there is still a much bigger mission in reducing emissions for environmental as well as financial reasons.
Business models with a shared savings agreements between tenants, FM and landlord could be a solution to finance energy efficiency projects, and crucially to provide an incentive for stakeholders involved to improve the efficiency of centralised shared building services.
If you’d like to discuss how Watts-ON can make the difference for your business get in touch for an initial consultation.