Bluewater Shopping Centre at dusk
The UK’s second biggest shopping centre is attempting to halve its seven-figure energy bill using technology from Anglo-American firm Sefaira.
With an annual energy bill of £1.4 million, the owners of Bluewater say they intend to use Sefaira’s ‘Renew’ software to seek out inefficiencies and attempt to develop a capital investment programme that they hope will improve energy efficiency.
Using data from the existing building management system at Bluewater, as well as Sefaira’s own energy systems modelling software, the Renew software program has already begun crunching huge amounts of data from Bluewater to assess the centre’s energy use in areas such as the building fabric, heating and cooling systems, lighting, as well as daylight and building controls.
“The process starts with pinpointing inefficiencies across the public areas of the centre’s 1.6m square feet of floor area,” said Sefaira chief executive Mads Jensen. “Then over the next two months we will work closely with the Bluewater team to design a programme of upgrades and improvements to unlock maximum savings at minimum cost – before sequencing these enhancements in the most capital efficient way possible.”
Crucially, the software staggers the action plan over a number of years, sequencing improvements for optimum efficiency and incorporating a long term capital investment programme, with much of the capital investment coming from savings made over the course of the plan.
“It’s a long term action plan,” Varun Singh, Sefaira’s vice president of engineering, told Energy Demand. “No management can ever reasonably be expected to invest a significant amount of money upfront. So essentially it takes into account an annual capital allocation in order to achieve deep energy savings. So year on year, the management will invest a certain amount of money and also take a portion of the savings and reinvest that into the facility from an energy savings perspective to achieve 50% energy savings over a period of 10 years or so.”
The system uses cloud technology which allows the modelling system to utilise several servers, dramatically speeding up the process, Singh added.
Lend Lease – the company which manages and part own Bluewater – said the approach may be extended out across other parts of its property portfolio.
“Over the past years we have worked very hard to manage energy use at our retail centres, achieving reductions of around 20%” said Pascal Mittermaier, the company’s head of sustainability for Europe, Middle East and Africa. “But we are reaching the limits of what traditional methods can achieve. If we want to make another major step, we need to rethink our overall approach.”
He added: “Traditionally building operators have taken a piecemeal approach to managing facilities. For example by focusing on lighting one year, doors the next and the boiler system the year after, it’s possible to capture regular efficiencies of between 2-3%. Bluewater has been successful here achieving significant reductions – but now we need a different approach.”
Rachel Parkes
Rachel Parkes is a business journalist specialising in energy and the clean tech sector. In her five years as a reporter and editor she has also worked for titles such as Renewable Energy Focus, RenewableUK’s RealPower magazine, Gas Matters and LNG Business Review. She has a degree in Politics from the University of Sussex.
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