Optimising building efficiency

We are responsible for a historic, diverse and iconic mixture of central London assets across Regent Street and St James’s.

This presents unique and complex challenges in heritage conservation balanced with future climate resilience. Years of modification and development to accommodate changing customer uses and public requirements have created further complexity.

During the year, we started the building management systems (BMS) optimisation project to improve the energy efficiency of the London commercial property portfolio in line with our Group energy reduction targets.

We targeted our highest energy-consuming buildings to ensure they were operating in accordance with their intended design specifications and optimal servicing requirements. The programme ran from September to December with a focus on heating, cooling and ventilation controls. Many of the BMS settings had become misaligned, resulting in energy inefficiency and wastage. Our work uncovered a number of challenges that required engineering solutions to ensure our engine rooms were set up to deliver the best BMS performance.

A programme of interventions was developed and commissioned across 21 properties. Examples include:

• adjusting plant run times to remove out-of-hours usage and demand

• returning plant set points to design parameters to further reduce demand and enhance customer comfort

• adjusting plant control strategies to align with design principles and operate more efficiently

• modifying condenser water system controls to reduce heat leaks, and reduce cooling demand and energy use

• reconfiguring a heating system to have a greater reliance on the ground source heat pump (GSHP) system, resulting in significant energy savings

• training maintenance engineers on GSHP operations to ensure consistent performance

We are expanding this work to drive greater energy efficiencies across our portfolio.