Sustainable Business

SB March 2013

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Case study Bluewater 2/3 Lend Lease, Pascal Mittermaier, says: "Bluewater is a great case study for what's going to happen to many projects, buildings and initiatives in the future. For the last five or six years we have picked the famous low-hanging fruit – we've sealed windows, changed lightbulbs, upgraded building management systems. "We have carried out measures that have got us to about a 20% reduction in carbon and energy use over the last three or four years," he adds. Despite these impressive annual reductions, Mittermaier and the team at Lend Lease found that this approach had its limitations and further savings have become harder to achieve. "We wanted to look at how to invest money so that you're not just reducing energy and carbon by another 2-3% each year," he adds. "It's more about what sort of quantum leap you can take with investing money and what's the most amount of energy and carbon that can be reduced as a result". The new approach moves away from the standard methodology, where traditional building operators take a piecemeal approach to managing facilities. Bluewater • 27m visitors / year • total mall floor area 1.6m square feet • annual utility bill for non-tenant areas: £1.4m • annual carbon emissions: 8,000 tonnes – equivalent to 14,000 homes • annual energy use: 16,800 MWh • biggest energy users are space conditioning (heating & cooling) & lighting, accounting for more than 90% of total consumption • the estimated combined energy bill for the UK's top 40 shopping centres is £40m This might mean, for example, a focus on upgrading lighting one year, doors the next and the boiler system the year after, capturing small savings per year. Mittermaier said: "The premise is that, for example, if there is something wrong with your car you don't just change the tyres and hope that the engine works well. Everything is integrated and the way that most buildings manage their energy or facilities is they'll put aside some money, let's say £100,000-200,000, and every year they'll upgrade whatever is next on their list, like windows. Then the next year they will tackle the air con- ditioning and the year after that they'll replace lighting and then in year five it's back to the windows. "The weakness of this system is that upgrading the windows can actually have an impact on the air conditioning and the doors. And changing the lights can impact on the heat and other aspects of the building". Instead, Bluewater is taking what Lend Lease claims is a pioneering approach that will look to integrate a systems management process which carefully considers the sequence of how systems are installed and upgraded, minimising the impact each process has on the next. Lend Lease describes its strategy as moving away from the facilities management point of view and heading into a much deeper project management approach. "It is taking a lot of time up front to understand the deep inter-relationships between all the components that influence energy, and which one impacts the next. If you can achieve that you can use the savings that you generate from the first round to help pay for the investment of the next project you want to take on. "You will always need someone to manage the facility and change a lightbulb for

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