The UK Green Building Council (UK-GBC) has recommended that the energy metric kWh per m2 be adopted across the building industry to provide a common unit of aspiration in the move to close the gap between design and building performance.
A new report from the council claims the unit of measurement should be taken up as a means to set common aspirations and communications throughout all sectors.
Having a shared or common aspiration is one of five key success factors identified by the UK-GBC Task Group that it says is required to tackle this gap as it was found that there was no common measurement in use.
Speaking at the edie Live exhibition yesterday, Lynne Ceeney, managing director of Lytton Consulting, project manager on behalf of UK-GBC and member of the task group, said: “We asked people how they measured building performance and found that there was no common definition of what building performance looked at. We’ve got capital providers thinking about return on investment; owners are worried about vacancies; designers may be looking at carbon; the occupier perhaps more on aesthetics.”
“We thought there might be a problem that people don’t understand what building performance is and that it’s made too complicated. When we looked at the number of metrics there are hundreds of the things and some of them are even really incomprehensible to those of us who are experts in the industry. So what we decided was to help the industry get behind one, and that is kWh per m2.”
By dividing a building’s usable floor space by its annual energy consumption, the UK-GBC believes the metric provides an easy to understand measurement of building performance for a whole range of stakeholders.
“The nice thing about it is the client understands it, whether that client is the occupier or whether that client is the owner of the building; they can get their head around it. Providing a simple metric, we think, will help immensely,” Ceeney added.
In its report, the UK-GBC Task Group argues that adoption of this unit would “help to create a common language and shared aspirations across the delivery process.”
“This indicator provides a common language for building performance that can span the whole supply chain. It is straightforward to understand for the owner, the occupier, and every part of the industry and is easily comparable as well as linking to running costs, carbon emissions, ESOS and occupier comfort. A particular benefit is that it can be easily monitored through meter readings and requires no complex equipment or personnel,” it states.
The report was carried out to determine the main reasons why building performance often fails to correspond with its design. It argues that often a wide range of factors – use of building products and utilities, staff behaviour and wellbeing – are not taken into consideration during the design process and even extends to retrofit and maintenance activity.
Julie Hirigoyen, chief executive officer of the UK-GBC, said: “The gap between the design intent of buildings and their performance in operation is significant. This means that, as an industry, we’re not only failing to manage our carbon emissions, but we’re also failing to manage our operating costs and we’re compromising our ability to deliver other positive outcomes such as health, wellbeing and productivity for occupiers.
“This report attempts to cut through the complicating noise around this issue. It points to existing tools and simplified processes. The challenge will come in our willingness to change as an industry.”
