Achieving Excellence with NABERS UK
Vaia Vakouli shares insights into performance focused energy efficiency certification, NABERS UK.
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Vaia Vakouli
Sustainability Consultant
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December 2, 2024
Energy efficiency in buildings is crucial for reducing global carbon emissions due to their significant energy consumption. Improving energy efficiency is vital to combat climate change and achieve a carbon-neutral future.
Sustainability schemes like BREEAM, LEED, and Passivhaus promote energy efficiency in design. NABERS UK, the National Australian Built Environment Rating System adapted for the UK, focuses on managing and optimising building energy use.
NABERS UK’s Role
Developed in Australia, NABERS addresses the unique challenges of the UK built environment. It assesses and rates office buildings, offering developers and property managers a reliable tool to enhance energy performance.
Unlike many schemes, NABERS UK provides transparent and standardised energy efficiency benchmarks. This encourages higher performance standards, reducing carbon footprints. Its exclusive focus on energy performance delivers precise assessments and actionable improvement insights.
A cornerstone of NABERS is post occupancy evaluation, which measures real world performance and supports continual optimisation.
Achieving a NABERS rating
The process starts in the design phase with realistic energy simulations rooted in realism rather than conventional building code methods. Projections are stress tested to ensure resilience, mitigate performance gaps, identify potential weaknesses and make pre emptive adjustments.
Optimising passive design—natural ventilation, insulation, building orientation, window sizes, and shading—is critical. These elements reduce reliance on active systems, yielding significant energy savings and sustainability benefits.
Collaboration between the design team is essential. Architects and energy consultants must align passive design strategies with NABERS principles to achieve performance targets.
Benefits of optimised passive design
Optimised passive design reduces carbon footprints, lowers operational costs, and enhances occupant wellbeing by improving indoor environments. It also boosts resilience, ensuring functionality under extreme conditions or energy price fluctuations.
Sub optimum passive design can potentially derail NABERS targets, leading to increased costs and complications. It increases reliance on active systems like HVAC, leading to higher energy consumption and missed NABERS targets. This can result in costly redesigns, extended timelines, and additional investments in energy-efficient technologies.
Neglecting to optimise passive design undermines sustainability goals while imposing financial and operational burdens that could have been avoided with a thoughtful, integrated design approach from the outset.
NABERS in action
Collaboration between architects and sustainability consultants is key to maximising passive design’s potential. Realistic energy strategies aligned with NABERS requirements ensure energy performance goals are met. By prioritising passive design and teamwork, NABERS UK enhances energy efficiency, sustainability, and cost savings.
For developers and building managers aiming to lead in energy performance, embracing NABERS UK is a strategic necessity.
Okana’s sister company, Ryder Architecture, known for its innovative and sustainable design approach, is currently working on an office scheme in London aiming to achieve 5-Star NABERS rating. The project is currently in technical design stage and illustrates the vital importance of collaboration. The Ryder team is working in close collaboration with Okana’s Sustainability Team, together with a leading construction and property development company and a trusted infrastructure consulting firm, to drive the project’s success, ensuring that the ambitious environmental performance goals are met.
To understand more about NABERS and how to apply to your projects, contact the Okana Sustainability Team.
As discussed by Helen Rivers in The Okana Podcast.
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