Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Energy efficient Bayside Mall lauded by city
Mall wins award to lead green ethos
GROWTHPOINT Properties’ Bayside Mall has been named a winner at the 2015 Energy Efficiency Forum Awards.
The City of Cape Town, in partnership with Eskom and the South African Property Owners Association (SAPOA), launched Cape Town’s Energy Efficiency Forum (EEF) in 2009 to assist commercial buildings and operations improve their energy efficiency.
Bayside Mall in Table View scooped the award for the large building retrofit category, raising the bar for energy efficiency at shopping centres in Cape Town and across the country.
The mall’s energy efficiency interventions include upgrades to LED lighting and improvements in the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning system.
The projects have yielded consistent monthly energy savings averaging at 11 percent so far, with the hot summer months expected to bump savings up to 17 percent.
Growthpoint chief executive, Norbert Sasse, says: “Winning this award shows we are on the right track to achieving our own green goals, and we hope it also inspires others to do the same, going beyond what’s required to ensure we are resource-efficient and preserve our environment as best we can.”
Growthpoint is South Africa’s largest REIT and a JSE ALSI Top 40 Index company. It is a Platinum Founding Member of the Green Building Council South Africa (GBCSA), a JSE Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) Index company and a Dow Jones Sustainability Index company.
It owns and manages a diversified portfolio of 471 properties in South Africa, 53 properties in Australia through its investment in GOZ and a 50 percent interest in the properties at V& A Waterfront. Growthpoint’s consolidated property assets are valued at over R100 billion.
Stephan le Roux, Growthpoint’s divisional director for retail, says: “Our sustainability projects that produce solar energy, harvest rainwater, and convert waste into energy all make Bayside Mall more selfsufficient by generating its own energy and reducing its waste to landfill.”
Bayside Mall’s flagship project was a 500kWp pilot rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) plant, with 2 108 panels covering 3 300m². It supplies 5 percent of the electricity needs in this shopping centre, which spans over 45 000m² of retail space and welcomes in excess of 7.5 million shoppers each year.
“The annual average daily energy production of these panels is 2 100 kWh, which equates to the average daily use of 150 households in Cape Town. The installation of the PV panels has also resulted in carbon emission reductions equivalent to 767 tons of CO2,” says Le Roux.
The mall has also invested in a rainwater harvesting and reuse intervention. This involves the extraction, detaining, storage and utilisation of stormwater run-off from the shopping centre’s hard surfaces and rooftop.
This results in a 93 percent water saving in landscaping and public toilet usage.
The mall’s waste-to-energy intervention involves the anaerobic digestion of organic waste that is generated in the shopping mall each day. A waste-to-energy electricity generation plant has been constructed and will introduce a further 250 to 330kWh a day in the near future.
This will be fed back into the mall for use in powering in its common areas.