Save Energy! 3 Lessons to Energy Management | Sustainability in Real Estate

Energy consumption is a result of how the property being used, it's often not a choice, but, it is one of your biggest opportunities to save overhead and operational costs. You can get a strong return on your investment. You will do this by first understanding your energy consumption, luckily for you, this is easily quantifiable. Additionally, traditional business modelling works well and will help you make the right decisions on how to invest & manage your energy consumption.

So what are the three most important things to know when you are going to track your energy consumption:

1. Track what you are willing/can change
2. Use the right frequency
3. Use deductive metering techniques to save costs

What are the influencers in your energy consumption?

There are four types of people who consume energy in your building, property owner, property operator, tenants, & visitors. Each of these participants has different roles and impacts on the energy profile of a building, subsequently, different abilities to improve it as well.

Property Owner - The energy performance affects you in terms of costs (depending on the lease types) in turn it will affect your asset valuation as a part of the operating costs. You also have an opportunity to manage energy consumption standards as a part of your tenants' leases.

Property Operator - Will should look at the performance of the property and continually identify problems and take corrective actions as quickly as possible.

Tenants - Will want to manage this as a part of their core operating management. While its financial impact is relatively small in comparison to the overall performance of a company, the proper management of their energy consumption will reduce operating budgets.

Visitors - Are not directly affected by energy consumption as they don't pay the energy bills and have very little impact on the performance of the building in relation to tenants. This argument doesn't stand in the case of a property which primarily handles transient visitors as the majority occupant such as retail, transit, sporting facilities, restaurants or hotels, in these types of situations you would want to look at visitors in the same light as the tenant would look at their staff.

How to track your energy

Before getting into specifics the most important thing to consider is what you are willing and able to do with the data you collect, as an example, if you track the quantity of air being provided into the data room, can you or would you even change anything with the settings? if your answer is NO, then don't waste your time and money setting up sensors/meters to track the information. If you can make a change then that is the data you want to start to track. A great example of this would be the occupancy of a meeting room vs. the light and HVAC usages.

Frequency

With regard to energy consumption, you will want to track this in real-time and as accurately broken down as possible as it relates to the use of space.

Example:

1. In a manufacturing setting, you would want to track the energy per manufacturing shift and compare it to the quantity of production to be able to identify trends. It would be incorrect to track it per week as that would not give you any meaningful data you can understand.
2. In an office setting, you would want to break the floor area up as best as you can so you can understand the energy patterns of the meeting rooms vs. closed offices vs. open offices, as well as track the quantity of people to use a reference. The frequency here might be hourly or less depending on the quantity of transient visitors.

This type of tracking will then help you determine what upgrade are worth it, or possibly educating the staff on energy-saving options might yield a better saving. in any case the variables are too difficult to try to predict, which is why tracking and monitoring are the most important tool to improving your energy performance.

Tracking System

There are 3 components to an energy management system

1. Sensors & Meters - These collect the raw data within your building and reports its performance
2. Data Management Software - This collects all the various sensors and compiles the data and outputs a graphical representation which can be used to identify problems and opportunities
3. Energy Manager - This person is tasked with reviewing the data and identifying problems and opportunities for improvement.

Opportunity

Once you have identified areas that are consuming more energy than expected then you will start looking at a simple proactive measure to improve the performance, this can include re-commissioning equipment, maintenance or an education program for the users. I would suggest that expensive retrofits and renovations should be the last resort when looking at improving your energy performance, but if the proactive approach can't resolve the problem then start to check if it makes financial sense to make a larger retrofit.

Risks

If things don't have the desired or modelled outcome then the financial repercussions could be negative. A strong contingency is suggested especially if there is a large capital expenditure.

As energy costs continue to rise this will reduce the profitability of your asset and reduce your valuation, thus the bigger risk might be inaction. If you are the tenant then this same impact would increase your operating budget and may impact your future growth.

Have any thoughts? Share them below, and as always please share this article to help others learn.

#Sustainability #Building #Design #RealEstate #Green #Standard #Ontario #Energy #Performance #EnergyManagement #Money #Waste