DISCUSSION Energy efficiency at Bluewater: a Lendlease initiative

Lend Lease, a Tomorrow’s Company member has started an innovative process to reduce energy consumption at Bluewater shopping centre in Kent, one of the largest in the UK and Europe. Over the past four years, Bluewater’s energy bill has been reduced by 20% to £1.4m a year as a result of energy efficiency measures such as upgrading the building management system, changing light bulbs and sealing windows.  Although, the best these efficiency measures can result in are improvements of 3-4% a year, since they are done on an individual basis.

Lend Lease is keen to drive this forward and halve energy consumption, saving money long-term and reducing the carbon footprint to transform Bluewater into “Europe’s most energy-efficient retail complex”.  Lend Lease is working with Sefaira, a cloud-based technology company that makes energy efficiency software;  they are able to analyse large chunks of data on various factors (building fabric, heating, cooling, lighting, daylight and building controls) to analyse Bluewater’s energy consumption.  This is a pioneering procedure due to the complexity and substantial amount of data.

Pascal Mittermaier, the head of sustainability at Lend Lease is using an “integrated and holistic” approach to make a greater impact on energy consumption rather than targeting individual areas as one area can impact the other. He asserts that “sustainability is only successful if you start looking at it in an integrated way”, and Lend Lease is working simultaneously on (around) 50 factors that affect the energy use at Bluewater.  In the long term, Lend Lease aims to apply this pioneering process to their other UK shopping centres.