Managing power lightens the bill
Turning off equipment when no one is around has saved Goodman Property Trust big dollars. The large property owner has scooped an energy award for saving more than $1 million in energy costs in five years in seven Auckland buildings.
More than half of that comes from managing electricity use through metering and monitoring systems that turn off lights and air conditioning and other electricity guzzlers when no one is around.
The trust has won the energy and emissions reduction category in the 2018 Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA) annual awards for the project, involving the seven buildings on Fanshawe St near the waterfront.
The seven buildings are Goodman’s VXV office portfolio, which was recently sold to funds associated with large international investor Blackstone. The sale is subject to Overseas Investment Office approval.
Saving energy came at a cost, but it’s a tiny proportion – less than 1 per cent – of the overall value of the seven buildings, which fetched $635m.
Over the five years, the project saved more than 7.5 million units of electricity – the amount that about 1070 households would use each year.
Goodman said that amounted to $1.1m in operating cost savings for the buildings’ tenants and it also represented a reduction of 775 tonnes in carbon emissions.
Energy use had been reduced from an average cost of $310 per square metre a year to a forecast $180/sqm by 2019.
Trust engineering and building services manager Craig Stephens said the project so far had cost about $5m, including about $200,000 provided by EECA to upgrade metering systems in the buildings.
Stephens said that as a landlord, there was no immediate payback in the energy efficiency upgrade because the tenants paid for the electricity, but long term the energy efficiencies enhanced customer retention
MARTA STEEMAN ‘‘A lot of it is through management, just actually identifying what’s been left on and runs 24/7 and has no need to.’’
Craig Stephens of Goodman Property Trust
and the quality of their buildings.
The project included setting up metering and monitoring systems, developing an alert service to detect irregular energy use, a programme to fix faults, continually reviewing the heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting systems and upgrading older equipment.
‘‘A lot of it is through management, just actually identifying what’s been left on and runs 24/7 and has no need to. There’s a lot of that.’’
The aim was energy use when people were present, and minimal use after they left.
‘‘But what happens is lights get left on, air conditioning systems keep running, all of that sort of stuff.’’
He said probably more than 50 per cent of the energy savings came from managing use better. Part of that was about turning things off.
One of the problems they found was that a security guard walking through at night would trigger the lights and air conditioning systems to start.
Another issue was that the noise from the air conditioning system made the system think there were people present, and so it kept running.
‘‘It’s getting on top of those sorts of things, that’s where the management comes in and that’s what makes the biggest impact,’’ Stephens said.
Of the seven buildings, three were new and four about 10 years old. The majority of the savings were in the older buildings, while managing systems better in the new buildings helped.
Businesses located there include Air New Zealand, KPMG, Microsoft/HP, Auckland Transport, Fonterra, Datacom and Bayleys.
The seven buildings had more than 88,000 sqm of rentable space with a daily workforce of around 7000 people.
The trust expected to spend another $2m to $3m to complete the project, Stephens said. That would include LED lighting upgrades and fac¸ade improvements to provide shade and reduce air conditioning loads.