Your Environmental Guide to Energy Performance Certificates
Assessing energy impacts of buildings and their assessment
According to the CLG (The Department for Communities and Local Government) and many other sources, our buildings are responsible for almost 50% of the UK’s energy consumption and carbon emissions[i]. Buildings have a large amount of energy embedded in their structure, and also continue to use energy throughout their lifetime through heating, lighting and water use.
With the Government focusing more and more resources into ways of reducing our impact on climate change, energy performance in buildings is being promoted as a priority. In response to a recent Directive introduced by the EU on the energy performance of buildings, the UK has introduced Energy Performance Certificates (EPC’s). What is the Government looking to achieve and who will be affected by this move?
Energy in buildings
It is easy to take for granted the energy required to construct a building. This does not simply include the energy used to transport the materials to the building site and to operate machinery used in the construction process, but also the energy embedded in the construction materials themselves. This includes energy used to turn wet clay into hard bricks, to turn limestone into lime and cement, to extract and process the copper, steel and aluminium used in a building, and to fabricate insulation and roofing materials. As mentioned, buildings continue to use energy throughout their lifetime and at the end of a building’s life, energy is used to demolish it and to recycle and dispose of the waste.
Voluntary assessment
In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the construction of ‘Green’ or eco-buildings. These are classified as buildings that are sited, designed, built, renovated and operated to energy efficient guidelines and that aim to have a positive environmental, economic and social impact over their life cycle.
The Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) family of assessment methods and tools are designed to help construction professionals understand and mitigate the environmental impacts of the developments they design and build[ii].
BREEAM provides an independent, voluntary rating system, which can be applied to the majority of new construction projects and demonstrates the broader environmental performance of a building (ranging from energy to ecology). In terms of energy, BREEAM will assess performance associated with white goods, lighting, carbon dioxide emissions, energy management and the use of metering. In order to achieve an ‘Excellent’ rating, measures such as the use of natural light, renewable energy (such as solar or wind) and the use of efficient lighting and electrical appliances are considered.
Energy Performance Certificates (EPC’s) – Whom do they affect?
As highlighted, there is a significant amount of energy embedded in the structure of a building. It is therefore almost always preferable to consider refurbishment before new construction. England contains a vast amount of heritage in the form of old buildings. In most cases these buildings were not constructed with the environment in mind, and therefore consume a large amount of energy through the use of inefficient boilers, absence of double-glazing and poor insulation.
The introduction of Energy Performance Certificates (EPC’s) by the UK Government aims to highlight the energy efficiency of new and existing buildings and to provide a benchmark for which improvements can be made.
The initiative was introduced in April 2008, requiring by law that any person or organisation owning a building with a with a total floor area greater than 10,000m2 display an EPC upon sale or lease. This will be extended on a stepwise basis to include all properties – home and commercial - by October 2008.
Any publicly owned property is required to obtain a Display Energy Certificate (DEC). This takes the EPC a step further and necessitates the certificate to be permanently displayed for public viewing.
There has been question over the efficacy of these certificates, as no penalty is attached to a poor rating. However, the idea is that the rating may influence the interest of a prospective tenant or buyer and potentially affect the future value of the property thus encouraging future efficiency improvements in order to obtain a better rating.
For more information on Environmental Performance Certificates, please refer to the Directives Timeline page.
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