ESSAY 7
Energy performance

Bill Bordass, Usable Buildings Trust

It is over 40 years since the first oil crisis in 1973–74, and a quarter of a century since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 put anthropogenic CO₂ emissions firmly on the map. By now, one might have expected the UK to have a firm grip on reducing the energy use and carbon emissions from its buildings, particularly new and refurbished ones where architects and other building professionals are deeply involved. While low energy is just one of many attributes of a sustainable building, it is also fundamental given the importance of energy security and the threat of climate change. Our work in the 1990s⁶⁸ also showed that while low-energy buildings were not necessarily also comfortable, well designed, well procured and well managed, buildings could indeed manage to be all of these things.

Performance gaps

So how good are we at producing low-energy buildings? Not very: today there are often large differences between intended and actual performance, with some new buildings even having higher annual carbon emissions than their much older predecessors. Fortunately, as the evidence builds, there is a growing realisation that these performance gaps really do exist. However, there is some confusion among the construction industry and government as to what to do about this, with committees threatening to make things unnecessarily complicated and bureaucratic.

Case study evidence of these performance gaps has been around for many years, including in some publications by the author more than a decade ago.⁶⁹, ⁷⁰ However, it has tended to be ignored, or dismissed as anecdotal. Why? Because neither government nor the building professions has regarded building performance in use as a legitimate knowledge domain, as has been argued by past RIBA president Frank Duffy.⁷¹ Consequently, on matters of building performance in use, the government tends to turn to the construction industry … but the industry doesn’t know, because it is appointed to design, build and alter buildings, not to see what really happens after they are completed, and to feed back the experience into its designs and processes.

We have been making the categorical error that building performance is about construction and regulation, rather than the result of a much wider range of influences as buildings are occupied and evolve through time. This thinking is reflected in the titles of government reports and initiatives, including the Egan Report ‘Rethinking Construction’ (1998), the Fairclough Report ‘Rethinking Construction Innovation and Research’ (2002) and the naming of the Green Construction Board (2011).

The Fairclough Report⁷² was commissioned:

• to prepare for the expiry of the government’s Framework Agreement with the Building Research Establishment (BRE), five years after the regrettable privatisation of BRE in 1997: another manifestation of a market mantra that fails to appreciate the public-interest dimension of good building performance
• in response to the continuing dismemberment of the former Environment Department following the 2001 General Election, with its responsibility for construction sponsorship being transferred to the Department of Trade and Industry

The report saw building performance largely as a matter for regulation, not something that goes far wider. However, it did identify four aspects of government interest to support building research: as a regulator, a sponsor, a client and a policymaker – ‘for issues that go wider than the construction industry’ – here mentioning climate change, energy efficiency and unforeseen circumstances.

In spite of this, it still seems difficult to wrest building performance away from construction – and to get joined-up government thinking and action in the area. One shaft of light has been Innovate UK’s sponsorship of a programme of about 100 building performance evaluations, several of which have provided material for this book. Sadly, the programme ended in 2014. To avoid a rush of unintended consequences, there needs to be a constant flow of performance feedback information and insights in the public interest, and to support the radical improvements that policy requires.

Building professionals and building performance

Where does this leave the building professional? To protect society’s wider interests, professionals have a responsibility to do ‘the right thing’, going beyond the obligation to whoever pays their fee. The idea of professionalism may seem dated, because over recent decades the social and political culture has tended to see the professions as just another branch of business. However, the challenges of sustainability now bring professional obligations into sharp focus, with the common interest now on a global scale. As Malcolm Bull⁷³ puts it: climate change does not tempt us to be less moral than we might otherwise be; it invites us to be more moral than we could ever have imagined.

A milestone in the history of building performance was the book of the same name⁷⁴ by the Building Performance Research Unit at the University of Strathclyde, published in 1972. However, history has shown this to be more an epitaph than a manifesto. In the same year, Stage M – Feedback was removed from RIBA’s document ‘Architect’s Appointment’, on the grounds that the service could not readily be quantified and clients were unwilling to pay for it. Sadly, this also applied to government clients – though at the time government departments still had their building professionals, their works departments and their research units (not to mention the Building Research Establishment) and were doing a lot to close the feedback loop, implicitly and explicitly. In the ensuing decades, government tended to outsource, privatise or abandon these activities, but neither industry nor the building professions saw fit to put alternative feedback systems in place.

Without such feedback, how can building professionals know that they are doing the right thing? Frank Duffy⁷⁵ has said: ‘Plentiful data about design performance are out there, in the field … Our shame is that we do not make anything like enough use of it.’

Because such follow-through and feedback has not been routine, many people say it can’t be afforded. I say we can’t afford not to. Professional institutions already require their members to understand and practise sustainable development, so surely this must include understanding the outcomes of their own activities? If you call yourself a building professional, get to understand how your buildings really work in use.

Towards better-performing buildings

Keep things simple and do them well

Studies in the 1990s, including the Probe studies of published post-occupancy evaluations (POEs) reviewed in a special issue of Building Research & Information,⁷⁶ revealed that unmanageable complication was the enemy of good performance, a finding now echoed in the results of Innovate UK’s building performance evaluation programme.⁷⁷ It showed that many things that one would hope to take for granted (e.g. the thermal integrity of the fabric and the functionality of controls – both manual and automated) often leave a lot to be desired. The buildings that worked best tended to be both relatively straightforward in their design and to have received attention to detail – in design, during construction, and before and after handover. Another important ingredient of good performance was an individual (or, better still, several individuals) committed to getting a good result: process is no substitute for leadership!

Robust or fragile buildings?

With dedicated input, complicated buildings could also work well if sufficient effort was put into both their procurement and their operational management, from briefing through design and construction and into operation. The best of these often had a dedicated client representative who provided leadership and insight right through the process. However, as time passed, it became clear that complex buildings that had worked well in their early life could nevertheless prove fragile in the face of organisational changes, for example when facilities-management budgets were reduced in the face of economic difficulties, or when skills were lost when in-house facilities management was outsourced. Better to be simpler and more robust, particularly for public buildings. Sadly, over the past decade, buildings and the related legislative requirements have gone in the opposite direction, becoming ever more complicated, not least many recently constructed schools: expensive to build, expensive to occupy and often with large performance gaps in terms of energy and carbon. This is because theory tends to favour the more complicated solution over the simpler one, while performance in use stresses the importance of making things robust, usable and manageable.

Improve the process

Not only is the concept of completing work, handing it over and going away not fit for purpose for today’s buildings, the whole procurement process needs reexamining. The golden thread from design intent to reality must be maintained throughout the process; at present it is often severed as a project moves from stage to stage, sometimes with an almost complete change in ‘players’. Should it be any surprise that performance gaps open up and that innovations do not hit their targets?

The Soft Landings framework⁷⁸ has been developed to give more emphasis on outcomes, and to reinforce any existing process at five critical stages:

• inception and briefing
• managing expectations during design and construction
• preparation for handover
• initial aftercare
• longer-term aftercare – typically for three years after handover.

The approach works best if one or more members of the project team adopt the role of Soft Landings champions, who can help to maintain the focus on outcomes and support and challenge other team members.

Count everything

Designers tend not to be very good at predicting actual energy performance in use. The architect too often asks the computer modeller or building services engineer: does it meet the regulations? If the answer is yes, the design proceeds; if not, options are reviewed and changes are made – often adding complication, because this makes the sums work better though often not the buildings themselves. The results of the calculations can be difficult to understand, and focus on so-called ‘regulated loads’, representing the energy end uses covered by the Building Regulations – i.e. heating, hot water, cooling, ventilation and fixed interior lighting. The numbers may look good, but the assumptions can be questionable. Not only does the energy used by these loads tend to be severely underestimated, but they can also be just the tip of the iceberg – particularly in non-domestic buildings, where the occupier’s equipment and management can dominate. Unfortunately, building designers often think this has nothing to do with them, while in practice if the priorities are communicated clearly and early, there can be not only an influential dialogue but designers may make the building and its systems better able to be controlled and managed effectively in relation to likely patterns of use.

Focus on performance in use

In 2001, in Flying Blind⁷⁹ the author argued that building performance needed to be made visible to spur people into action, and saw opportunities within the EU’s proposed energy certificates. This led to the development of Display Energy Certificates (DECs), based on actual energy use, which came into force in England and Wales in October 2008, but only for public sector buildings over 1,000m².

While DECs have helped to expose the performance gaps, they have been a disappointment for three main reasons:

• The government seems to regard them as a bureaucratic procedure, not an evolving window on performance and the anchor for a variety of policy measures.
• DECs have not been extended to commercial buildings, in spite of getting into the Energy Bill 2011, with strong support from the building and property industries and the CBI. At the last minute they were removed from the Energy Act by the Treasury, reportedly owing to concern about the benchmarks and pressure from major retailers who did not want to sell A-rated appliances from D-rated buildings.
• Extraordinarily, in view of their importance in terms of clarity of communication and furthering policy objectives, there has been absolutely no government investment in benchmarking for a decade.

The unfortunate history of DECs is described in ‘Mandating Transparency about Building Energy Performance in Use’, in Building Research & Information.⁸⁰

The bizarre consequence is that for all the policy interest in improving building energy and carbon performance, we still lack clarity on the key objective: how are buildings actually performing? While this could act as a rallying point for all the players involved, we instead continue to fly blind in a bureaucratic fog. One positive development is CarbonBuzz⁸¹ – a platform developed with support from the Technology Strategy Board, RIBA and CIBSE, on which people can deposit and share their design and in-use energy data and which provides support in identifying contributors to the performance gaps. However, we still need proper government support with coordination and benchmarking.

Whatever happens, building designers need to get much more familiar with how their buildings work in use. Only then will we understand what we need to do to get them to perform better. A promising development is Commitment Agreements as used in Australia, where a developer and their design team undertake to provide a building that performs in accordance with its design predictions. This has been a great success for landlords’ services in rented offices (‘base buildings’ – something very close to ‘regulated loads’). The Usable Buildings trust is currently part of a team that is exploring the feasibility of adapting this system for the UK and the EU,⁸² including a series of pilot projects.