Sustainable apartment blocks
The always excellent The Fifth Estate online green property newsletter has another great article this week: Apartment blocks the missing link in sustainability.
The author Lynne Blundell introduces the challenge for apartment blocks, saying:
“High rise apartment blocks, it turns out, are the biggest energy guzzlers in the residential market. But they are falling through the cracks when it comes to energy and water efficiency incentive schemes. It is something that local councils are acutely aware of while state and federal government appear to be turning a blind eye.”
While she provides a strong case that there is a big policy hole and some very specific challenges — such as the strata rules that govern changes to common areas, she mentions some really positive schemes too. Not unusually, it is local government that seems to be showing the way.
City of Sydney is providing funding for Green Strata Wiki to provide an online knowledge base about retrofitting existing apartment buildings. The council is also regularly running workshop for apartment owners with presentations from lawyers, water and energy companies and other sustainability experts.
Willoughby Council is also providing a grants scheme for improving the sustainability of apartments. The Climate Clever scheme has two parts – energy efficiency and solar photovoltaic, which provide dollar-for-dollar matching to successful owners corporations.
Sydney Water is piloting a programme called HiRise, which aims to improve the water-use efficiency of participating buildings by at least 10% by co-funding auditing, sub-metering and water efficiency improvements. According to Sydney water, one of the benefits of sub-metering is detecting leaks: “a leak could waste 73 kilolitres a day, amounting to $136 a day or $49,537 a year.”
One of the big challenges of sustainability upgrades is funding. Efficiency improvements will often pay for themselves over a few years, but owners corporations still need to find some capital upfront. This is still an issue when co-funding is available, such as with the schemes mentioned above.
Sustainability initiatives should start with measurement, whether that is an audit or better still installing sub-meters. A building dashboard. can help the owners corporation track energy and water used in common areas, and allow individual apartment owners to measure their own performance, compared to others in the complex.
Sub-metering can also open the door to a big financial benefit, which can help address the funding challenge.
Most residential apartment blocks in WA are on the standard residential electricity tariff with each apartment owner individually billed by Synergy. However, except for small apartment blocks, the total electricity used by these buildings will be above the ‘contestable level’ of 50,000kWh per year. This means the Owners Corporation could enter into a supply contract with another retailer at commercial rates.
Multi-residential buildings are quite attractive to retailers because the load profile is different to other commercial buildings and significant discounts on the standard residential tarrif are available. The discount can be as much as 40% in some cases. The owners corporation then needs to charge individual apartment owners for the electricity use along with their strata fees.
Our wireless sub-meters and energy monitoring dashboard can enable this kind of solution, help make apartment blocks more sustainable, and save money through efficiency and lower electricity prices.
