Delivering Building Performance
The UK Green Building Council have recently released a report recommending that the energy metric 'kWh per m2' be adopted across the building industry to assess energy performance.
The report was carried out to determine the main reasons why building performance often fails to correspond with its design. The UK-GBC Task Group found that when people were measuring building performance, there was no common definition which was being looked at. Capital providers were thinking about return on investment; designers were looking at carbon; the occupier perhaps more on aesthetics.” Having a shared or common aspiration was one of five key success factors identified by the Task Group to deliver higher actual building performances. Another key factor was not to 'design simply for compliance. Performance improves when aspirations are not limited to compliance'
The UK Green Building council therefore proposes that 'the buildings annual energy consumption per m2 of usable floor space' is used across the building industry to help create a common language across the delivery process. By using this indicator, all stakeholders from the designer, to the builder, to the client, to the occupant will all have an understandable metric that links well to their particular interest, whether it be running costs, carbon emissions, occupier comfort, etc. A particular benefit of this is that it can be easily monitored through meter readings and requires no complex equipment or personnel.
AeroTherm supports the UK-GBC proposals, as assessment for the product in Rd-SAP and building regulations is currently calculated through U-Values, which measure conductive heat loss. On paper, this figure is insignificant for AeroTherm, as it is a ultra-thin heat reflective coating that focuses on reducing energy consumption. But when measured for its actual performance, then AeroTherm can achieve up to 35% energy savings (as the co-heating tests have shown). By incorporating this metric as a provision for building design, then AeroTherm can be fairly assessed and open it up to many more clients that have expressed interest.