Tackling the energy performance gap

Geoff Prudence, energy performance gap, facilities management, facilities manager
Facilities managers as guardians of energy performance — Geoff Prudence.

Proactive facilities management combined with Soft Landings and Building Information Modelling can help reduce the energy performance gap of buildings, argues Geoff Prudence, chair of the FM group of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers.

New buildings consume, on average, over 50% more energy than expected, based on energy calculations at the design stage. This shocking statistic is based on evidence collected by CarbonBuzz, the RIBA/CIBSE benchmarking platform for tracking energy use in projects from design to operation. This difference between energy consumption as calculated at design stage compared with the actual energy used by a building, as recorded by its utility meters, is known as the building’s performance gap.

CIBSE first highlighted the existence of a performance gap over 20 years ago when it published the findings from the Post Occupancy Review of Building Engineering (PROBE) studies in its journal. More recently the UK Government has funded research into the gap with an £8 million Innovate UK Building Performance Evaluation Programme. This is examining the in-use performance of 23 recently completed non-domestic buildings against the designer’s original energy objectives.

The fact that so many buildings use more energy than their designers intended is clearly a major issue for any building owner or occupier lumbered with paying for the energy. As someone with experience gained from working in the facilities-management sector over many years it is my opinion that one major reason for this discrepancy is the lack of a champion for the building’s in-use energy consumption from its initial concept through its construction phase to its eventual handover and operation.

Since facilities managers are the people charged with running a building through its life, it stands to reason that they should be those most capable of being guardians of its energy performance during the building’s realisation.

As such I urge facilities managers to seek early involvement in a scheme’s design, where possible. This is most readily achieved for buildings being developed for owner occupation.

Unfortunately, too many facilities managers wait to be asked for their input to a design or, worse, adopt a ‘we-get-what-we’re-given’ attitude.

This is wrong. Facilities managers know which management strategies they will be implementing to get the most out of a building. They should push for these strategies to be integrated effectively into the design from the outset, rather than accepting what they are given on handover.

A big potential advantage of the use of BIM will be to enable facilities managers to have all the information necessary to enable them to operate a building at peak performance throughout its life

Where facilities managers are appointed later in a scheme’s development they can still have an impact by impressing upon the client the value and longer-term cost benefit of their being engaged in commissioning and handover to ensure that commissioning is undertaken effectively and that they better understand the building, as it will be their responsibility to operate it efficiently.

One of the most effective ways in which a facilities manager can contribute in helping minimise the performance gap is through their involvement in ‘Soft Landings’ — or ‘proper landings’ as I prefer to term it.

This is a process developed to ensure the transition from design and construction to occupation is bump-free by involving the building’s eventual occupiers and facilities-management team in the design and construction process and retaining the involvement of the design and construction team after the building is handed over. More specifically it enables the facilities-management team to question design decisions and input positively to solutions on the basis of ongoing maintenance and operational costs to ascertain the design will meet client and occupier needs and that it can be cost effectively maintained.

As the building nears completion, Soft Landings has the benefit of allowing facilities managers to be involved in the commissioning process and to be fully briefed by the contractor and design team to ensure correct operation of engineering systems. This should allow the facilities team to ensure the building reaches its optimal energy performance in minimal time.

On a building’s completion, Soft Landings can help minimise the performance gap by ensuring the design team remain involved with the building following its handover through an on-going presence on site to answer questions from both the occupants and the facilities-management team. The approach also calls for a building to be monitored for three years post-completion to enable a comparison to be made of the actual energy use against design calculations which, if nothing else, should ensure the designers are aware of where the performance gaps are occurring. This should then provide valuable lessons for implementing on future projects.

More recently the Government has adopted Soft Landings as part of its Building Information Modelling policy (BIM) to deliver Government Soft Landings (GSL). Government is looking to GSL to deliver significant improvements in cost, value and carbon performance of its building assets through the use of open, sharable asset information. It has made clear that BIM will be embedded in all central-government-procured schemes from 2016.

A big potential advantage of the use of BIM will be to enable facilities managers to have all the information necessary to enable them to operate a building at peak performance throughout its life, which will help minimise the performance gap over the life of a building.

Soft Landings can help minimise the performance gap by ensuring the design team remain involved with the building following its handover through an on-going presence on site to answer questions from both the occupants and the facilities-management team

For BIM to be most effective to those charged with managing a building, FMs need to ensure that the information contained in the model is in a standardised format for all plant and its maintenance requirements. To this end, CIBSE is working closely with others in the industry on standard product data templates (PDTs), which include key operational data about the energy using systems to support the FM function. With operational information incorporated into the BIM model, facilities managers will have all the information they need to operate the building in one central database without having to maintain separate asset management systems.

CIBSE is also represented in the cross-industry group BIM4FM, which is championing BIM for the FM industry and specifically that asset-information models in BIM are based on recognised FM standards and requirements rather than a design/construction information-flow perspective. This is where BIM has the greatest potential in delivering better data to support decision making during the operational life of the building, which can last for decades and can cost far more than the original construction of the building.

Operational energy waste is often cited as the largest contributor to the performance gap. However, the recently published ‘CIBSE Guide M: maintenance engineering management’ brings together everything designers and FMs need to know to operate buildings efficiently and effectively. On the operational side there are chapters dedicated to maintenance strategy, business risk assessments, maintenance contracts, condition surveys, maintenance audits, training and competency.

We know that the information contained in CIBSE Guide M is valued simply from monitoring the number of times it is downloaded from the CIBSE website; it is one of the single most widely accessed titles in the entire CIBSE online library.

While facilities managers will always set out to minimise operational energy use, until the situation changes and their knowledge and experience is reflected in their involvement in a scheme’s design, I am afraid facilities managers will be doomed to wrestle with inherent design failings — with very little possibility of being able to close the performance gap.

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