Case Study EP&T: Record Savings at British Land through sustained monitoring programme

The importance of sticking to a long term energy saving strategy, built around a monitoring programme, is critical to success.

British Land have achieved record savings of £6.8m over the last 6 years, and reduced energy by a third across eight buildings in the last 3 years, through the continued collaboration with EP&T Global and their unique monitoring programme.

 

Project Summary:

British Land first engaged EP&T in 2009, to trial a monitoring programme that had successfully delivered DJSI sector leading buildings and commercial building portfolios in Australia. They launched the monitoring system at York House which went on to deliver 56% in savings against the original 2008 baseline. This provided the business case to enable British Land to roll-out to a further 20 commercial offices and shopping centres over the next 6 years.

The end result is that, through successful application of the energy monitoring platform and monitoring technology, British Land have been able to reduce occupancy costs by £3.93 per m2  per year on average and win numerous accolades including eight CIBSE Building Performance Awards and taking a leading position in the CDP, and GRESB amongst others.

Achieving £1m savings per year across 246,000m²requires a commitment from tenants, landlords and property management to work collaboratively and the EP&T programme helps facilitate this process. EP&T’s system collects data from an extensive sub-metering network of electrical, gas, water and thermal meters and combined with temperature data, uses big data analytics and a team of expert engineers to analyse 78 million sets of data per year. This unique process is able to identify opportunities to save energy and improve occupier comfort on an ongoing basis.

Broadgate estates and the occupiers also have access to the system to implement and track their own initiatives and to deliver accurate and timely recharges.

Lessons Learned from the project:

  • EP&T provided savings guarantees, which apart from helping strengthen the business case for each site, also acted as a strong incentive for all parties to achieve the targets set.
  • To deliver an energy monitoring programme of this scale, you need standardised processes, economies of scale, and a common platform. Deploying EP&T as a single service provider ensured this happened and provided all round accountability for implementation and driving the targets set.
  • A collaborative approach between EP&T as the monitoring specialist and Broadgate Estates as the property managers was key to delivering the savings identified and sustaining the programme savings over 6 years – it also helped deliver knowledge transfer and best practice to the engineering teams and across the estate.
  • Using a cloud based solution enabled EP&T to minimise disruption associated with major technology improvements over the 6 years to develop the analytics needed for incremental improvement.
  • Best practice gained from retrofitting meters and systems into live buildings was applied to new developments to ensure they met or exceeded the British Land offices benchmark.

What conclusions can be drawn from the project?

The importance of sticking to a long term energy saving strategy, built around a monitoring programme, is critical to success. This includes; engaging occupiers through the use of accurate data, having the courage to force better operating strategies around tenant service (including heating and cooling) and working collaboratively to drive down occupancy costs and improve comfort. Resetting targets periodically and having good escalation processes also proved essential to avoid complacency creeping in and continue progress. Finally, the use of advanced technology proved key when it came to identifying saving opportunities from the high volumes of data being collected.

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