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 Working Group expects to publish its initial findings on commercial and financial models for sustainable retrofit by the Autumn of 2009.
The Working Group is chaired by Neil Pennell of Land Securities. The group draws on the experience of the GLA group’s Building Energy Efficiency Programme (BEEP) which has developed a performance contracting method for sustainable retrofit of public buildings. The group is also collaborating with the LDA’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.