Many property companies will feel more than a little daunted when they look at the amount of work the industry needs to do to make its commercial building stock greener. According to the UK Green Buildings Council’s report on energy performance targets for commercial offices, published this week, property needs to slash energy demand in these assets by 60% if it is to help the government hit its net zero carbon target by 2050.
There is already a recognition that the industry cannot act alone. Richard Twinn, UK Green Building Council’s senior policy adviser, says the government should be doing more to support the sector, including stepping up efforts to provide legislation, regulation and incentives for the industry to meet green building targets.
The UK Green Building Council’s report provides a timeline over which the sector needs to tighten energy performance in commercial buildings. By 2035, offices aiming to be net zero “should be operating at the energy performance standards that will be needed by 2050”, according to the research.
Landlords seeking to operate zero carbon offices should first meet the energy performance targets outlined in UK Green Building Council’s report, using renewable energy and offsetting any remaining carbon in their buildings.
In order to gain the net zero status, landlords need to submit data proving how they met this standard, which will be independently verified and publicly disclosed on an annual basis. This is to increase transparency and to make landlords demonstrate how the net zero balance on their offices has been achieved.
Follow the investors
At the moment, larger developers and investors are leading the way in slashing energy use and carbon emissions in commercial building operations. Although there are minimum sustainability standards in place for these assets, government needs to crack down harder with regulation, Twinn says.
“Most of the activity we have seen around [regulating minimum standards] has been from the larger landlords who are answering their investors,” Twinn says. “At the lower end of the market, these smaller landlords without institutional investors are not really having to do anything, because there isn’t the enforcement process in place.”
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy is currently consulting on how to tighten these minimum standards, but Twinn believes immediate action is needed.
“We are starting to see investors leading far quicker than the government is able to, quite frankly, as policy will always lag behind to a certain extent,” he says. “I think where we’re seeing interesting work from government is that they have proposals to tighten minimum standards. They’re looking to consult on mandatory operational ratings this year, but they aren’t moving anywhere near as quickly as investors seem to be.”
What leading looks like
Even with government encouragement, landlords and tenants will have to collaborate and take ownership over bringing down energy demand in offices, Twinn says.
But establishing how landlords and tenants can practically apportion responsibility for lowering energy use is “very difficult”, he admits. “There isn’t really that kind of data available on sort of broad splits, and that is partly owing to the fact that we don’t measure it because most office buildings still don’t have clear sub-metering between landlords’ and tenants’ responsibilities,” Twinn says.
Ultimately, he reiterates, it is down to government again to provide guidance on how much responsibility each party should take in lowering energy use in offices. “What we’re trying to do at this stage is indicate where we should be getting to,” he says. “This is what we think leading should look like.”
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