UK offices waste a year's CO₂ for more than 3,470 Homes… in one day

Parts of the UK are once again exceeding a high of 30 degrees Celsius. Despite the heat, Demand Logic data indicates that operational inefficiencies in UK office buildings will result in more than 29.1 gigawatts of energy consumption for space heating (predominantly via gas boilers). This is equivalent to the annual gas consumption of 3,470 UK homes, corresponding to 5,843 tonnes of CO₂-e in greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s right. By day-end, the UK’s office buildings will needlessly emit more than 3,470 UK households do over the course of an entire year. 

Why does this happen?

An office building’s heating and cooling systems usually operate within set parameters, as well as inputs from the building’s occupants. Say, for example, somebody steps into their office in this sweltering heat and asks the concierge to drop the temperature, which activates the air conditioning. Once the temperature falls below set parameters, or becomes uncomfortable for others, you might expect that a simple adjustment would be made to the air conditioning. Unfortunately, heating systems often kick in instead. In other scenarios, if the heating system is already running, and occupiers complain of heat, some buildings simply activate the air conditioning without shutting down the heating system. Just like a car or any other mechanical system, buildings need to be re-tuned to operate most efficiently. Many aren’t.

Demand Logic data indicates the present status quo leaves sizeable room for improvement. Even during sweltering days like today, an alarmingly high number of heating systems in UK office buildings are running, and churning out proportionate greenhouse gas emissions minute-by-minute. Using our earlier numbers, an entire year’s worth of greenhouse gas emissions of the average UK home will be churned by UK office buildings every 25 seconds–and this is before you account for the carbon footprint of the excess air conditioning being used to counteract the heating.  

How did we calculate this?

Demand Logic is a building performance optimisation platform plugged into some of the most iconic and best-performing buildings in the UK and Ireland. Our second-by-second analytics of millions of datapoints inside buildings provides an unparalleled insight into the good, the bad, and the ugly of machinery and spaces within UK commercial buildings. 

Even on days when temperatures exceed 30 degrees Celcius, we observe heating systems in some buildings continuing to run–equivalent to an average 384Wh of energy waste per square metre of office space from our sample. Accounting for the 83.1 million square metres of office space calculated by the UK Government, and an average gas price of 6.5 pence per kWh, this costs an estimated £2.6 million in gas each day. These calculations were made from a sample of buildings tracked by Demand Logic, which tend to be more environmentally conscious and efficient than the wider “population” of the UK’s office building stock. This means the true national figures are likely to be substantially worse than we’ve estimated by extrapolating from our sample. 

How can this be solved?

Demand Logic has observed common causes of the inefficiencies explored in this report. Noteworthy solutions include: 

• Repairing faulty valves and other system defects (e.g. if a cooling valve is stuck open, triggering the heating system)
• Revisiting the bands between heating and cooling systems to ensure they are not overlapping, causing both to run at the same time
• Recalibrating set points between adjacent air conditioning systems (particularly in larger buildings)
• Ensuring sensors appropriately reflect the actual indoor environmental condition (e.g. if a partition wall is moved, a thermal sensor might not reflect the temperature of the appropriate room or space)

Fundamentally, before thinking of capital expenditure, building owners should reflect on the building’s settings, sensor locations, and broken components. 

Looking forward

London of the 1980s resembles the climate of present-day Edinburgh. These environmental conditions are what much of the UK’s building stock was designed for up until the 2010s. Looking forward, a 2019 climate study forecasted under a conservative scenario that London’s 2050 climate would resemble present-day Barcelona (higher temperatures, drier summers and wetter winters). A substantial proportion of the UK’s existing buildings were therefore built for a maximum outdoor temperature of 28 degrees Celsius (what would be one of this week’s cooler days). Given that design is built into our existing building stock, and 72 percent of the UK’s 2050 building stock has already been built, the UK and other countries will be heavily reliant on already-stretched plant machinery to adapt to outdoor climate pressures. The efficient use of these systems will be increasingly vital not only to mitigate carbon emissions, but also to maintain the comfort of a building’s occupants.