Case study 2 February 2020

Environmental compliance

  • SAVINGS – Over £600k per year

The challenge

Like most businesses, this High Street Bank is subject to rising energy costs and was therefore looking for ways to reduce energy consumption, to save money, stay competitive and reduce carbon emissions from their built estate.

Energy and sustainability regulations often help promote energy efficiency, and therefore cost savings, if implemented well with effective compliance. The EU Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings, in particular, was created to improve the energy efficiency of buildings, reduce carbon emissions and reduce the impact of climate change.

Our client wished to work with a partner that could not only advise how they could be compliant with this Directive, but also help them to implement the required works.

The solution

Compliance with the EU Directive includes air conditioning unit inspections for systems above a certain size.

Staggeringly, air conditioning can account for a third of a building’s annual electricity cost. On top of this, older, oversized or poorly maintained air conditioning systems may actually be using more energy and therefore costing more to operate than necessary.

Using our extensive range of Low Carbon Energy Assessors across the UK, we undertook a rolling programme of air conditioning energy inspections across our client’s estate to ensure their compliance with the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive.

We then made recommendations to ensure energy efficient operation of their cooling equipment and also created energy initiatives and environmental efficiency replacement programmes to help them achieve their demanding carbon targets.

The outcome

The environmental efficiency replacement programmes identified by our reports have to-date delivered more than £2m of refurbishment works across the estate.

These included energy efficient inverter replacements, driven by compliance with the EU Directive, which have in turn resulted in operational cost savings of over £600k per year.

Further savings have also been made through improvements to the optimisation of time schedules, temperature control and staff awareness.

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