The expectations on prime commercial offices are higher than ever.
Prime commercial offices not only need to be functional on a practical level providing comfort for the building occupants, but also need to meet targets for performance and efficiency for Net Zero Carbon (NZC) and Environmental Social Governance (ESG) requirements. In response, occupiers are demanding life cycle environment rating systems measuring energy, water, waste, and indoor environment performance of buildings. This demand is in addition to BREEAM Excellent, WELL Platinum certifications, Platinum Wiredscore and Smart Building ratings.
This increasing demand from more sophisticated occupiers creates opportunities to produce new prime offices and reimagine existing stock that stands out by offering a modern and attractive asset that meets these needs and attracts premium returns.
To ensure commercial viability, it is essential that innovative technology is introduced that adds value and is paired with creative design to deliver tangible outcomes around ESG reporting, data transparency, cyber security and net-zero carbon measurements.
The developers and their investors are demanding digital evidence to inform their design, based upon accurate real-time data to answer specific but crucial questions around these outcomes, including;
- How well do new office buildings perform holistically in terms of energy, water and waste?
- Where can design improvements be made and efficiencies found?
- How can the tenant experience be improved through new technology?
This data led design process will inform the optimum design solution that fundamentally achieves the end users’ requirements and mitigates waste, and hence will optimise tenant demand. The need for high-level building data is not news to real estate clients, although this is a rapidly evolving complex market and it is ever challenging to align the asset with the emerging end user NZC and ESG imperatives.
An innovation land grab
Developers and end user clients are rapidly seeking to understand what new technologies are coming to the market, how they can leverage them to save carbon and energy, and how they can confidently record and report on the benefits being achieved. The vendor market has grown exponentially in recent times with fuzzy confidence on ability to deliver solid benefits. This uncertainty has created natural hesitation when making selection decisions, yet the appetite and urgency remains.
Intelligent Building technology consultants combine expert knowledge of real estate, building systems and software solutions where they play a key role in engaging leading market vendors to obtain high integrity real time building performance data. By collaborating and qualifying with industry innovators already trying to solve this challenge from a demand side market, they have been expediating turnkey pilot tested solutions that deliver to expectations.
Proof of value with a benefit baseline
The most effective method to acquire data to respond to this urgent need is to undertake robust digital building audits. In collaboration with industry data analytic vendors, the Intelligent Buildings consultant can deploy and deliver a 30-day data-driven assessment of a building’s existing system performance so we have a clear baseline. Installing a physical data acquisition device to extract extensive system information, performance data is processed through a software analytics platform so it can be studied. Using advanced software tools, the team can analyse the trend profiles across a building’s energy infrastructure, evaluate the best investment opportunities for intervention, and deliver an outline business case of performance gaps, energy waste, tactical modifications required, investment costs and comparative benchmark analysis.
The results of these audits can be surprising with new buildings and refurbishments being up to almost four times less efficient than they are designed to be, even those that have achieved a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating. This data will be utilised to inform smart office designs to align with the occupier’s expectations and reduced potentially abortive capital costs. Furthermore, the Intelligent Building consultant will employ sophisticated, intelligent digital analysis of a building’s outputs over a 30-day period with minimum disruption, providing rapid performance profiles that quickly expose simple adjustments and corrections that otherwise are easily missed, potentially saving exorbitant amounts of wasted energy that are tragically unknown about. This will provide easy, quick-win solutions as well as long-term strategies that ensure a building operates at least as well as its design, if not better.
Attracting future investment
Whether delivered first time or through retrospective adaptation, energy efficient prime offices will meet the occupier NZC and ESG imperatives, deliver significant operations savings and attract future ESG investment, with investors increasingly requiring indisputable data led proof of the sustainable outcomes.
As a vendor example, digital data was acquired during the building output audit for an Investor Client on their new office asset following practical completion. The platform presented immediate analysis insights extracted from huge volumes of real time systems data such as the Hot Water System (HWS), fans, motors, electrical loads and Variable Air Volume (VAV) units. This identified that the HWS equipment was running outside of its expected run hours and the VAV systems were running on some unoccupied floors for up to 70 hours a week. This allowed adjustments to the installations resulting in an overall saving of £130,000 recurring annual costs and saved £346,000 across their portfolio.
The digital audits continue to demonstrate value for clients across healthcare, retail and the public sector, the collective results recorded are seeing upwards of £16m annual energy savings, equalling 220m kWh or 77,000 tonnes of CO2e.
It is clear that the occupiers are demanding the highest standards to meet their NZC and ESG needs that must be delivered through the implementation of smart technologies to both unlock value and to drive our industry towards a greener, more efficient, and cost-effective future. The data driven design will mitigate the risk of abortive capital costs, although this does not guarantee the successful operation of the asset and therefore the Intelligent Building consultants should be retained to digitally audit the systems to ensure the performance is achieved.
By Gary Ashton and John Gleeson
