ROBO CON VIOLENCIA O INTIMIDACIÓN EN LAS PERSONAS (Art. 242)

The Energy Saver Scheme was a New South Wales (NSW) state government initiative offering support to businesses to increase the efficiency of their operations. The scheme offered eligible businesses spending more than $60,000 on electricity every year a 50% subsidy on energy audits, advice on retrofit business case development, technical support to aid implementation of environmental upgrades, and assistance with accessing other government schemes. The scheme operated from 2009 to 2013. Non-identifying pre-processed data from the energy audits completed under the energy saver scheme were made accessible by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage for the period up to April 2013. The data consisted of site data for 381 buildings in NSW, and energy efficiency opportunity data for 1983 upgrades, collected in a Microsoft Excel database. Site data included building type, postcode, floor area, energy use, energy end use breakdown, energy time of use breakdown, and tariff information. The opportunity data includes information about energy saving upgrades identified in the building audit, including opportunity description, status of upgrade, the sub-system impacted, and the status of the upgrade.

All records were analysed as there were insufficient records in the database to limit the analysis to Class 5 office buildings. Given the paucity of database information related to office building energy use, it was assumed that insights into all building classes may provide insights for office buildings, for instance on preferred lighting technologies being recommended and installed. Any identifying data was removed from each record, and the entries were coded according to building type, e.g. Accommodation, Club, Office, etc. The breakdown of building type is shown in Figure 4-15. Figure 4-16 shows the location of the buildings, according to the postcode data.

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Figure 4-15 Building types represented in the Energy Saver Level 2 energy audit database for NSW.

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Food manufacturing and farms, manufacturing, accommodation, and clubs represent the largest subsets within the database. Only 2.56% of the site records are for office buildings, a total of 10 records. 54% of the audits occurred in Sydney CBD or the Greater Sydney region. 61.2% of the audits occurred in metropolitan areas, the remainder occurred in rural regions as defined by Department of Agriculture (2014). The average energy intensity of the records with both energy and floor area (156 records) was 237 kWh/m2, 7.5% lower than the average for office buildings calculated in Section 4.2.1. There was a large variance in the recorded values; the minimum value was 5.8 kWh/m2, and the maximum was 979.1 kWh/m2. The standard deviation was 182.9 kWh/m2. Without access to the raw unprocessed data it was difficult to verify the accuracy. During the interview process, discussed in Section 4.1, Consultant C noted that the energy saver audit process was:

A really rigorous process to go through. Having effectively a third party [OEH] critiquing your work and saying, no, we need more evidence here, we need more back up behind this energy savings estimate. It was a lot more work than a regular energy audit, so they were very good quality audits that came out of that process

Given the small sample size, the energy saver audit data was of limited value in investigating the retrofitting of office buildings. Despite this, it was of interest to understand the recommended retrofits, and the status of the refurbishments, to understand current technologies being installed, and evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention.

A total of 1983 energy efficiency upgrades were recommended for implementation through the energy saver audits, an average of 5 upgrades per building. In many cases, an identical upgrade strategy was recommended for numerous locations within one building. An analysis of the opportunity data revealed the great majority of recommended upgrades were upgrades to lighting, as shown in Figure 4-17. Of the upgrades recommended in the reports, 55% have either been completed or are currently in progress, and 33% are still being considered (listed as potential). Only 9% of projects were abandoned, and less than 1% were deferred. The status of the recommended upgrades is shown in Figure 4-18, listed by upgrade type. HVAC projects had the highest completion rate (25%), compared to lighting (25%), hot water (15%), VSD (11%), and photovoltaic projects (11%). Photovoltaic projects had the highest abandonment rate (16%), possibly due to the suspension of the Solar Bonus (feed-in tariff) Scheme in April 2011.

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Figure 4-17 Breakdown of recommended energy efficiency upgrades from the Energy Saver scheme. The first chart shows the breakdown of all opportunity entries possible, including multiple records for upgrades to different sections of one building. The chart on the right shows opportunity entries at the building level, i.e. no duplication of upgrades in different spaces.

Figure 4-18 Status of energy efficiency projects recommended by the Energy Saver scheme, current in February 2014. This data was for all opportunity data; there may be several entries for lighting upgrade for a single building, as the upgrades take place in different spaces.

The technologies recommended for implementation in the category of lighting are shown in Figure 4-19. Installing LEDs was the most common recommendation, followed by T5 fluorescent tubes. This contrasts with the comments from the qualitative research that T5 was still the preferred

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technology for lighting upgrades for most consultants. These two technologies represent 65% of the recommended upgrades, being 40% LED and 25% T5. The abandonment rate of LED and T5 upgrades are within 1%; the rate for T5’s was 9.3% and for LED’s was 8.4%.

Figure 4-19 Lighting technology upgrades recommended by Energy Saver level 2 audits.