Work has begun to halve the seven-figure energy bill at Bluewater, the leading retail, leisure and events destination, and transform it into Europe’s most energy efficient retail complex.
With an annual energy bill of £1.4m for non-tenant areas, the owners of Bluewater will use software developed by Sefaira to lower its costs and carbon footprint, which is currently equivalent to 14,000 homes.
“These sorts of figures are typical across the retail industry,” said Sefaira CEO Mads Jensen. “Combined, the country’s 40 biggest shopping centres consume about £40m of energy annually. Our challenge is to raise the efficiency at Bluewater – halve its energy consumption – to make it an industry leader.”
Using its ground breaking technology, Sefaira has begun crunching huge amounts of data from Bluewater that influences the centre’s carbon footprint such as the building fabric, heating and cooling systems, lighting, as well as daylight and building controls.
“The process starts with pinpointing inefficiencies across the public areas of the centre’s 1.6m square feet of floor area,” said Mads Jensen. “Then over the next two months we will work closely with the Bluewater team to design a programme of upgrades and improvements to unlock maximum savings at minimum cost – before sequencing these enhancements in the most capital efficient way possible.”
Describing Sefaira’s groundbreaking approach as “an exciting, integrated, holistic way to enhance energy efficiency”, Lend Lease – who manage and part own Bluewater – said the approach may be extended out across other parts of its property portfolio.
“Over the past years we have worked very hard to manage energy use at our retail centres, achieving reductions of around 20 percent,” said Pascal Mittermaier, Head of Sustainability for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Lend Lease. “But we are reaching the limits of what traditional methods can achieve. If we want to make another major step, we need to rethink our overall approach.”
“Traditionally building operators have taken a piecemeal approach to managing facilities. For example by focusing on lighting one year, doors the next and the boiler system the year after, it's possible to capture regular efficiencies of between two and three percent.
“Bluewater has been successful here achieving significant reductions – but now we need a different approach.”
"But what we are now embarking on with Sefaira is a deep, integrated analysis of huge amounts of data – and then sequencing the changes in such a way as to deliver substantial savings for a significantly smaller capital outlay.
“Our ambition is to reduce common energy use by 50 percent – saving us and our clients money and reducing the centre’s carbon footprint even further.”
