London’s public buildings set for major energy audits

The announcement was made by mayor Ken Livingstone who said the two companies must guarantee energy and financial savings over several years based on what upgrades can be done.

The scheme will see groups of buildings be audited and a single contract set up to retrofit all of them together. This will allow for economies of scale and also consideration of long-term strategies such as decentralised energy supplies to save energy and money, according to the Greater London Authority.

Honeywell will audit 22 buildings belonging to Transport for London, including its Covent Garden museum, with the goal to eventually having all of TfL 50 buildings and 264 Tube stations audited.

Jim Bujold, Honeywell’s vice president for Europe, Middle East Asia, said the entire programme could be a boost for building services designers because of the many retrofit upgrades expected around the capital and London boroughs. Honeywell acting as the audit consultant not be recommending specific products, he said, bit it could compete at the tender stage along with other firms for retrofit work.

Dalkia is to audit 10 buildings each from the Metropolitan Police and the London Fire Brigade.

London’s move is part of a larger global initiative called the C40/Clinton Climate Change Initiative programme announced in New York last May. For the current initiative, 16 cities including New York will be working with the world’s largest energy companies, including, Honeywell, Dalkia, Johnson Controls, Siemens and Tran, and banks including ABN AMRO, Citi, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and UBS to retrofit public buildings.

Every city will available energy audits of its buildings, put in place competitive tendering procurement for multiple retro-fit contracts and have optional financing available from the banks.

The other cites in the first round of the retrofit programme are Bangkok, Berlin, Chicago, Houston, Johannesburg, Karachi, Melbourne, Mexico City, Mumbai, New York, Rome, Sao Paulo, Toronto and Tokyo.