DECs - a wider role

Display Energy certificates (DECs) are set to take a wider role in reducing overall CO2 emissions. As part of the UK Governments Carbon Plan, DECs look set to become mandatory for the buildings in the commercial sector as well as public sector.

The requirement is likely to be for non domestic commercial buildings to display their actual energy performance in the form of a DEC from as early as October 2012. If you are counting that’s only 18 months away.

Many businesses are not seeing the benefits of DECs or their cousins the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). The DEC is particularly useful because it details the actual buildings metered energy use, a very useful tool to start looking for ways of reducing energy use. It also comes with an Advisory report which details where savings can be made in the short, medium and long terms and provides details of their likely effect on CO2 emissions.

In time, how energy efficient a building is may affect how often and how quickly that building is sold or let. No one really expects the cost for gas and electricity to go down over the next few years which means that a poorly insulated building, with inefficient heating and hot water systems, and poor lighting is likely to score very poorly on a DEC rating, if a prospective tenant or buyer is faced with two similar properties but with widely ranging energy efficiency, they are likely to go for the building with the lower running and maintenance costs.

If DECs are to become mandatory for buildings from October 2012 I expect many business owners will put off getting a DEC for their building until the very last minute. But to do so could be a false economy, it may be better to have a DEC complete now, or a full energy audit, the advantage would be that their building will be in better shape before the legislation takes effect, but also its likely the building owner will start to see savings straight away. If you want to start saving on costs and adding profit why wait?

Another twist in the storey for DECs is a proposal that landlords should produce a Landlord Energy Statement (LES) for large commercial buildings where it is multi let to different tenants. Today to provide a LES is only voluntary, but a single DEC for a large multi tenanted building doesn’t really provide any incentives for changes to be made at tenant level. By introducing a mandatory LES and merging it with a DEC would give more detailed information on the tenants part of the building and therefore provide the encouragement to make improvements so their running costs are less.

Currently the threshold for the display of a DEC by a public authority in a building, which is frequently visited by the public will be lowered from 1,000m2 to 500m2. From 9 July 2015 the threshold will drop further to 250m2. It seems clear now that many industry bodies are pushing the Government to accept that the consensus is to now extend DECs to a much wider range of buildings, in terms of size and type of building, we now need to wait to hear what decisions will be made.

For full details of Energy Saving Experts DECs and Energy Audits go to www.energy-saving-experts.com