80% of Singapore buildings to go green by 2030

This is the ambitious target of the government under its new energy efficiency scheme.

Minister of State for National Development and Manpower, BG Tan Chuan-Jin today opened the International Green Building Conference 2011, the main highlight of the Singapore Green Building Week. This is the second conference organised by the Building and Construction Authority, the government agency responsible for the built environment and green building policies 1 in Singapore.

Singapore has set an ambitious target of greening 80% of its buildings by 2030, and its current challenge is on greening its existing stock of buildings. The financially stronger building owners usually initiate the retrofitting of their cooling plant, which typically accounts for 30-50% of the building’s energy consumption, when the age of the chillers reaches 12 to 15 years. The rest of the building owners, including the Management Corporation, however, may take an even longer time before they retrofit their buildings, citing reasons such as cost of retrofitting, lack of financing or awareness.

The Minister of State today announced a new pilot scheme called the Building Retrofit Energy Efficiency Financing, which will provide loans to building owners and energy services companies to enable them to carry out energy retrofits from 1 October this year. BCA and participating financial institutions will commit to sharing the risk of any loan default. So far, Standard Chartered Bank and United Overseas Bank have confirmed their participation in this pilot scheme.

Legislation has also been identified as the other avenue to meet the target of greening 80% of Singapore’s buildings. Since April 2008, BCA requires new buildings to meet a minimum environmental sustainability standard. The Ministry of National Development will amend the Building Control Act to extend minimum Green Mark standards to existing buildings as and when they are retrofitted, making Singapore one of the first few countries in the world to mandate such standards for existing buildings.

Besides meeting minimum standards, these buildings need to continue to operate at the optimum performance level, so that they will be able to reap the most benefits out of their retrofits. Thus, there will also be a requirement for owners to conduct three-yearly audit on their building cooling systems in these buildings.

To help owners pro-actively monitor and improve the energy efficiency of their buildings, BCA will require utilities companies and building owners to submit energy consumption and energy- related building data. With the information, BCA can monitor energy consumption patterns and measure the effectiveness of various initiatives adopted to improve energy efficiency in buildings. These data will form the basis of national energy benchmarks, which BCA will share with the industry.

BCA will be consulting the industry and stakeholders on the proposed amendments to the Building Control Act in the coming months.

Following the opening ceremony, Minister of State Tan Chuan-Jin witnessed the signing of 2 Memoranda of Understanding - one with the United Nations Environment Programme on a collaborating centre and the other with the Zhaoqing Municipality, Guangdong Province in China. The collaboration with UNEP will help drive greater adoption of sustainable buildings, while the MOU with the Zhaoqing Municipality will see Singapore sharing experiences and expertise with Zhaoqing as both work towards achieving carbon reduction and energy- saving targets to create a “low-carbon green city”.