Building Energy Policy in Asia - Building Energy Efficiency Ordinance (BEEO) in Hong Kong

Finally finished the 1st batch of essays and have time to do some revisions on the building energy policies that I am interested. Probably I can do some sharing on my blog and treat them as my revision notes as well.

Building energy related policies can be mainly categorized in 3 groups:

• Overview roadmaps and targets (Sustainable Blueprint in Singapore) 
• Compliance regulations (Building Energy Efficiency Ordinance in Hong Kong) 
• Market instruments (Carbon Cap-and-trade policy in Tokyo)

 Today, I will briefly introduce the Building Energy Efficiency Ordinance (BEEO in short) which just being implemented since 21st September 2012 in Hong Kong. BEEO mainly comprises of 2 parts:

• Building Energy Code (BEC) - for those newly constructed commercial buildings or they would like to undergo a major retrofit, they have to comply with the requirements as stated in BEC. For example, offices can only have 15 W/m^2 lighting power density at maximum.
• Energy Audit Code (EAC) - Owners of existing commercial buildings have to hire Registered Energy Assessors (REA) to perform energy audits for their buildings. They are performed in stages according to the age of buildings (Newest buildings are the 1st batch and they must do the audit in the 1st year after the policy is implemented). A certificate (only showing that you complied with the ordinance, not ratings on the certificate) will be issued afterwards and is valid for 10 years.   

Why commercial buildings? 

1. The energy consumption in HK by commercial buildings to residential buildings is in a portion of 2.5:1, so larger energy saving potential for commercial buildings. 
2. The ownership and tenancy of commercial buildings is easier to deal with. 
3. The building systems are relatively simple 

What is the significance of this policy?

1. The maximum requirements for BEC would restrain the energy consumption by the new commercial buildings.
2. EAC would provide valuable detailed energy data to the government for their policy intervention. 

Challenges 

1. There are many old buildings in HK, as the EAC requires them to fill in detailed information, e.g. efficiency of the chillers, they might not have the records for that. 

(The information is obtained from EMSD, HKSAR Government. More information is available by this website: http://www.beeo.emsd.gov.hk/en/mibec_beeo.html)

Energy Benchmarking for Hong Kong Office Tenants

Most of the existing building energy benchmarking tools use the total energy consumption of the entire building (landlord + tenant part) for benchmarking. However, if the building got a bad benchmarking result, it is hard to know whether the landlord or the tenant has to bear more responsibility for improving the energy performance. Therefore, it is worth to have a benchmarking systems to differentiate the energy performance of tenant and the landlord part (of course, it is always better if we could know the performance of individual building system, e.g. lighting, air-conditioning.... as well, but it is still very difficult to develop such system due to data availability.).

Hong Kong Green Building Council (HKGBC) therefore developed a benchmarking tool specifically for office tenants, so as to let them understand what their energy performance is and provide them initial saving potential suggestions. There are 2 parts of the system, a simple (free) and a more sophisticated tool. For more information, you can refer to the following website: http://bestoo.hkgbc.org.hk/greenbuilding/index.aspx

Hong Kong Energy End-use Data 2013 - Energy consumption by buildings keep rising!!!

In September of every year, the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD) would publish a report on the Hong Kong Energy End-use and it shows the city's energy consumption of 2 years ago (i.e. for the 2013 report, it kept the 2011 energy consumption record).

It is interesting to see that the portion of electricity consumption by buildings kept rising (92% of the citywide electricity consumption!!!) and let's do a quick overview of the statistics of this year. =)

(source: EMSD - HKSAR Government)

• The energy consumption of the whole city kept rising for 4 consecutive years and it is highest among these 10 years (278 618 TJ)
• Buildings consume for 92% of the total electricity used, while it is only 86% in 2001. 
• Even for the total energy use (including other use of fossil fuels), buildings in HK consumes 63% of the total energy use, while it is 54% in 2001. 

As Hong Kong is a city without much industrial activities, it is easy to understand that why buildings take such a large portion of energy in the city. But it is unforgivable that the energy consumption kept rising, while every city worldwide is emphasizing "sustainable development". 

Though you may argue that the Building Energy Efficiency Ordinance (BEEO) is just being enforced from 21 September 2012 and BEAM Plus (the building environment assessment system, just like LEED) is getting more popular over the years, the energy consumption will drop starting from 2012 or 2013. However, as BEEO only asks owners to provide their energy data but not setting a target for them and it is only the BEAM Plus for new buildings getting popular due to the GFA concession policy, I really doubted that whether the dream of having the energy consumption dropping will happen shortly. 

Probably, the HK Government should follow 

• Singapore - to set up a sustainable blueprint and strict targets of energy reduction
• Japan - to implement a comprehensive system, the Cap-and-Trade policy, for the buildings. 

For the whole report, please visit the following website: http://www.emsd.gov.hk/emsd/e_download/pee/HKEEUD2013.pdf

(too busy at the moment, probably will do a more detail introduction for worldwide policies and analysis in the future =) )