Benchmarking Industrial Building Energy Performance

Background

Due to the fact that the long term energy cost is in an upward trend, there is an imperative need to enhance energy efficiency by providing the necessary knowledge base. This project aims to apply the expertise and experience of the ESU to a new property type, the industrial building, in collaboration with JTC Corporation. As the largest industrial building developer and owner in Singapore, an accurate and reliable benchmark and database for energy performance will serve the immediate and long term objectives of the JTC in offering cost efficient, technologically advanced, comfortable, and environment friendly industrial premises.

Objectives

• To investigate factors affecting energy consumption of industrial buildings, and the consumption patterns and characteristics of different groups of industrial buildings.
  
  
• To develop a comprehensive and reliable database of energy performance of industrial buildings.
  
  
• To identify and rank performance indicators affecting energy performance of industrial buildings.
  
  
• To develop a benchmarking curve or a set of curves for evaluating and benchmarking energy performance of industrial buildings.
  
  

Background

Owing to the wide range of activities, products, processes and services hosted by industrial buildings, the project will focus its research and analysis on energy performance of industrial building with respect to the owner or landlord side of the consumption and usage. The project will focus on the following:

• Building energy efficiency with respect to design efficiency.
  
  
• Energy consumption of services systems managed by the landlord.
  
  
• Energy efficiency and performance of important and common processes identified by JTC.
  
  

The industrial landlord offers a wide spectrum of industrial facilities to cater to the needs of the tenants. For the purpose of this study, the scope of work has been narrowed down to one property type, that is, the flatted factories. This is because it is only meaningful to develop a benchmark where there is a large cohort of relatively homogeneous facilities. The energy benchmark which is developed based on the large sample size of flatted factories will provide building owners with an accurate picture of its energy performance ranking in relation to his peers.

Flatted factories are high-rise ready built multi-tenanted factories (typically 7-storeys high) designed for light industries. Frequently, they are developed in clusters owned and managed by the landlord or his agent, and tenanted to various small to medium size enterprises for light manufacturing, product processing and warehousing activities. Common spaces, shared amenities and services are maintained and operated by the landlord. Benchmarking energy performance of this building type is a step towards energy efficient development among industrial buildings.