"Smart Energy Panel" Seminar by London Business School Energy Club

Attended the captioned seminar this Tuesday and was almost the best seminar (as it is my interested topics) after I arrived in London. And from one of the speakers, I realized that it is planned that the building owners cannot lease or sell their properties if they got F or G rating in 2018 (admit that I know little about EU policies =.=). However, when I searched for more information about the policy, actually I was quite disappointed that the rating is referring to EPC (design rating) instead of DEC (operational rating)!!

I understand that there are much to be improved for DEC, for example

1. building categorization
2. inaccuracy of the result
3. cannot access the performance of individual systems

But at the end of the day, operating rating is more meaningful than design rating in my opinion (you can refer to the CarbonBuzz project that I introduced in my previous post)!!

Anyway, hope that the Government can pay more attention to the operating rating in the future......

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

Building Energy Benchmarking 101 - What is Energy Benchmarking?

What is Energy Benchmarking 

 It is to compare the Energy Use Index, i.e. energy used per floor area, of different buildings fairly by

• Categorization   – Grouping the similar types of buildings together
• Normalization   – minimize the objective impacts(weather,   occupancy) on the building’s energy use
• Separation     – excluding the special energy use in the buildings   (e.g. sever rooms)

What information it provides

Benchmarking systems usually tell you what your building's energy performance is, and probably some additional information as well. Take Display Energy Certificate (DEC) (UK) as an example: 

(picture source: https://www.gov.uk/)