Building Regulations, Part L2

According to the Confederation of British Industry, 30% of the energy that companies buy is wasted. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors estimates that buildings in the UK account for around 44% of our carbon emissions.

As energy costs continue to rise, and more and more regulations to save energy and reduce carbon emissions become law, there is an ever increasing need to understand the various requirements and take the right measures to implement them.

A combination of increasing energy costs and EU directives is causing a dramatic change in the metering requirements of all buildings.

Metering helps the occupiers of buildings to understand energy usage and identify patterns and trends, giving them the ability to control consumption and costs.

By providing valuable feedback, it can directly reduce consumption by up to 10% - and this is the key reason behind the recognition given by part 2 of the current Building Regulations, and its requirement for sub-metering in commercial buildings.

What's now demanded is a strategy for the collection and analysis of data - in other words, to ensure that sufficient meters and sub-meters are installed to enable owners or occupiers to measure their actual energy consumption.

Section 3.5 states: reasonable provision of meters would be to install incoming meters in every building greater than 500m2 floor area.

In buildings with a total useful floor area greater that 1000m2, to install automatic - that is, "smart" meter reading and data collection facilities - is fast becoming the only practical solution.

L2 Building Regulations support this. They say:

"Installing sub-meters in non-domestic buildings that enable at least 90% of the estimated annual energy consumption of each fuel to be accounted for is considered reasonable provision. As well as new build, this is applied to existing buildings when consequential improvements are made - that is, if building regulations control approval is required.

"If improvements are made, then 10% of these improvements must be for energy savings and carbon reduction.

"Reasonable provision of sub metering would be to provide sub metering as such that the consumption of final distribution boards of 50kW and above can be directly metered or reliably estimated.

"Where MCB sub-distribution boards represent a significant part of the overall demand within a building, breaking down this demand into more useable elements provides a greater visibility and understanding of the energy usage.

"Grouping lighting circuits together, and having separate information for the grouped small power circuits, provides substantial improvements in energy monitoring."

As Mike O'Brien, minister of state at the Department of Energy and Climate Change said in a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph:

"The big questions about smart meters are not 'whether'... but 'how' and 'when'".

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