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London businesses urged to measure & cut energy use

27 Jan 2010 09:59 AM

Businesses and organisations in London can learn how to cut carbon pollution from their buildings – with the help of a new toolkit published today by the Better Buildings Partnership.

Many commercial buildings have multiple tenants who all use energy but have no idea of how much they use. This makes it difficult for owners and occupiers to work out where to make savings and improvements. The Better Buildings Partnership toolkit provides simple, step-by-step guidance to businesses on what they need to do to measure the energy performance of their buildings.

Measuring how much energy a building uses – hour by hour, floor by floor – is essential to understanding how energy is consumed and to working out what changes need to be made.

The Better Buildings Partnership, a group of London’s leading property owners brought together by the London Development Agency, is calling on businesses across London to start monitoring the energy performance of their operations. This can then inform individual tenants where they can save energy and work in partnership with owners to cut London’s carbon pollution.

The Mayor of London Boris Johnson said:

"Commercial buildings pump out more than a third of London’s carbon pollution. This toolkit can help businesses cut down their carbon emissions and save money on their energy bills at the same time."

GE Capital Real Estate recently installed Automated Meter Reading (AMR) technology at their London HQ allowing them to monitor energy and water consumption on a half hourly basis. By making adjustments to the building management system and installing a waterless urinal system, they reduced electricity consumption by 17%, gas by 42% and water by a staggering 74%. This resulted in savings of around £60,000 a year, paying back their installation costs within a month.

David Short of GE Capital Real Estate said:

"This experience really brought home the old saying that if you want to manage something you need to measure it. Simply by using technology to get visibility on our half hourly utilities consumption and some expert advice on ways to reduce it we achieved significant savings in term of cost and carbon with very little expense and no disruption to our operations. We are now rolling the system out widely on our real estate portfolio to try to achieve the same for our tenants."

London Development Agency Project Delivery Director Martin Powell said:

"Businesses need to understand how their buildings use energy before they can work out how to cut their carbon pollution. The Better Buildings Partnership’s new toolkit will help them do that and will help move the commercial property sector toward an agreed set of standards and measurements."

The Better Buildings Partnership’s "Sustainability Benchmarking Toolkit for Commercial Buildings" can be downloaded free of charge at: http://www.betterbuildingspartnership.co.uk 

For further information, contact the LDA news team: Robert Beasley 020 7593 8437; public enquiries 020 7593 9000; out of hours media enquiries 07977 439371.

Notes to Editors

1 The Better Buildings Partnership aims to improve the sustainability of London’s existing building stock and to accelerate the reduction in CO2 emissions, supporting the Mayor of London’s target of reducing CO2 emissions by 60% by 2025 from 1990 levels.

2 Current Better Buildings Partnership members are: British Land, Canary Wharf Group, GE Capital Real Estate, Grosvenor, Hammerson, Hermes Real Estate, Land Securities Group, Legal & General Property, London Development Agency, PRUPIM, Quintain Estates & Developments, the Blackstone Group, Transport for London, Workspace Group.

3 The Better Buildings Partnership is one of a number of programmes developed by the London Development Agency to reduce London’s carbon pollution. For further details visit http://www.lda.gov.uk/server.php?show=nav.00100h00c 

4 The London Development Agency’s programme on climate change includes a range of projects to reduce London’s carbon pollution.   http://www.lda.gov.uk/server.php?show=nav.00100h00c