The Unmanned Switch – Green Leasing and the Human Factor

This article was orginally published on the website of NTNU's Metamorphosis Centre for Real Estate and Facilities Management website on 24th June 2016. It is presented here in an updated and edited form. The original can found here: https://tinyurl.com/y6qk29fr

Source: istockimg.com

The Human Factor

To use the metaphor of sustainable buildings as battlefield, the technologies that go into making it as such would be the artillery, and the people that use buildings are clearly the soldiers at the frontline. Technology (the artillery if you will) is designed to fulfil a specific purpose. An air conditioning will control the climate, a sensor may turn the light off if nobody is home, and double glazing will stop excess heat from escaping. As long as the technology is well designed and diligently maintained, it can be a fairly dependable component in the arsenal of sustainability. However, can the same be said of the soldier at the frontline?  Can our typical building user be an equally as reliable part of the bigger picture? The answer is complex and ultimately very difficult to answer.

If you were to get 100 office workers into a room and ask them to raise their hands if they leave on their office light, computer or other high consumption electronics when they leave for the day, the number would be undoubtedly staggering. This sort of behaviour is especially important to consider when it is revealed that lighting and computers represent the two highest energy consuming elements found in offices.

You might be thinking, why does this matter? Let us continue to think of energy consumption for a moment. If you imagine a computer is left on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and user of that building works a typical office work pattern (8 hours a day, 5 days a  week),  then 75% of the energy usage of that computer occurs when it is NOT being used. Energy costs every business money, and the poor usage of electrical devices represent another form of easily avoidable waste for businesses, a point of particular importance in difficult economic times in both Norway and across the globe. And this is even without mentioning the importance of sustainability on company brands, the demands of regulation or the compulsory requirements of sustainable building certifications such as BREEAM.

The reasons for the unpredictability of building users are numerous and could warrant an article (and certainly a PhD thesis) to answer adequately. That being said, the short version does provide food for thought. A lack of training is a significant reason for poor energy management in offices, and there is still a significant deficit in this regard that is preventing many buildings from reaching their full potential. Unsurprisingly, and no less crucially, attitude is a key player in terms of how people treat their devices. Ignorance of the consequences is a factor we would all recognise, but the cursory look at any major Norwegian office will tell you that the plethora of recycle bins and other such schemes are evidence enough that businesses and individuals are taking this issue more seriously in recent years.

 A key barrier from the perspective of attitude, is the difference in how people treat their office compared to how they treat their own home. People rarely leave for work with their lights and their Playstation left on at home. This is because there is clear incentive, the person who owns that home pays the electricity bill. In the workplace this sort of incentive is absent, and thus encouraging unsustainable behaviour. An approach to turning the light switch off that reflects what they would do at home would be considered a welcomed move in the right direction for sustainable development in buildings and prevent easily avoidable energy waste.

Enter – The Green Lease

Source: https://hearonearth.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/images-1.jpg

Despite the misanthropic tone of the previous paragraph, there is not only hope for this to be improved, but  also successful attempts at doing so. Better training, ‘turn everything off’ policies in offices and even gamification have all seen encouraging results in reducing  waste and energy consumption  in offices. There is however another emerging idea that has only seen light in the last decade, that of a Green Lease.

The Better Buildings Partnership, a British organisation of building owners working together to improve the sustainability of their building stock, consider such a lease as a “standard form lease with additional clauses included which provide for the management and improvement of the Environmental Performance of a building by both owner and occupier(s). Such a document is legally binding and its provisions remain in place for the duration of the term”. In short, a Green Lease is a lease where you don’t just pay your rent like a regular lease, but the tenant also has demands on them to use the building in a sustainable manner. These requirements can range from the mild (turning off the lights, recycling plastics) to the Draconian (specialised requirements for equipment procurement, restrictions on how many kilowatt hours of power a building can use). Some building owners even approach this from the perspective of inviting their tenant to co-invest in the buildings sustainable infrastructure, and then sharing the savings.

Whilst it is too early to effectively establish how successful this sort of arrangement can be, some Green Leasing arrangements have posted encouraging results. The American property investment company Jones Lang LaSalle have begun employing Green Leasing arrangements in their property portfolio, seeing 3%-13% savings when looking at their short term utility spend alone, and even claim that this was achieved through what they call “easy to implement sustainable measures”. Whilst not all examples will see such profitable returns, figures such as this can provide the groundwork for a business case for greener leases that could see them experience a wider implementation in coming years.

This type of approach however does not signal the definitive method that will solve the human factor in sustainable offices buildings in their entirety, but rather offers one possible solution, or even one that could work in tandem with other approaches such as building automation. Nothing however beats the simple turning off of a lightswitch.