Sustainable Retrofit
There is substantial guidance within the market in how owners and occupiers of commercial properties can retrofit their buildings with sustainable technologies to improve its environmental performance. However, a significant barrier in carrying out sustainable retrofit across the commercial property market is how owners and occupiers finance this work.
For landlords, it is difficult to justify investment to improve energy performance of buildings when returns from energy savings will accrue to the occupier. From the occupiers perspective, it can be difficult to justify investment in a building where the asset improvement benefits accrue to the landlords.
These challenges are further complicated in multi-let buildings where occupiers have different lengths of leases, and often very different business models.
The aim of the working group is undertake work on establishing commercial and financial models which allow tenants and landlords to fund sustainable retrofit projects.
The group will also compile best-practise case-studies of retrofit projects which identify the drivers to undertake the project, how any barriers were overcome including cost-benefit details.
The initial findings of the Working Group which focussed on the barriers and possible solutions to sustainable retrofit in the commercial property sector where published in the BBP Low Carbon Retrofit Toolkit.
The Working Group is chaired by Neil Pennell of Land Securities. The group draws on the experience of the GLA's RE:FIT programme which has developed an energy performance contracting framework for public sector bodies in London. The group is also collaborating with the GLA’s Decentralised Energy (DE) team to explore feasibility of connecting members’ buildings to low carbon DE networks in the City of London and more widely.