MarketPlace Leichhardt
One of the buildings in the Buildings Alive program that showed outstanding results during March was the MarketPlace Leichhardt shopping centre in Sydney.
Most large shopping centres are major energy and water consumers with significant opportunities for savings. However, with so much going on, it can be hard for facilities managers to find time to focus on energy management.
This is where clear and timely information about resource consumption can make the operator’s job much easier. ‘Glanceable’ graphs and alerts give the management team the information they need to quickly and effectively manage their centre’s building services.
Building Bio
- Type: Sub-regional shopping centre
- NLA: 17,693m²
- Built: 1975
- Location: Sydney inner west
- Owner: Local Government Super
- Manager: JLL
- Commenced with Buildings Alive’s REF Service: Sep 2013
A sample day in March
This graph, taken from one of MarketPlace Leichhardt’s daily REF messages, shows the saving in electricity consumption on 8th March 2017 (blue line) compared to a similar day within the last year (13th April 2016, red line), and REF’s expected profile (green line). REF performance monitoring shows the results of the operator’s active energy management.
Strategies for Success
Since starting the service in Sep 2013, the JLL management team, the BMS contractor and Buildings Alive have worked together using the daily REF messages to measure and verify various tuning initiatives. Significant energy savings were achieved through improvements to automation control strategies, including:
- Optimising the economy cycle controls and lock out to utilise more free cooling.
- Seasonal adjustment to mall temperatures to minimise overcooling.
- Introduction of improvements to cooling call logic to minimise heating/cooling conflict.
- Revision to cooling loop tuning parameters and chilled water reset temperature limits to optimise chiller staging strategy.
Long term performance
MarketPlace Leichhardt is one of the most energy and water efficient shopping centres in Australia with a NABERS rating of 6 Stars (4.5 without GreenPower™) for Energy and 3.5 for Water. Its energy efficiency of has been steadily improving for many years and so in January 2016 the statistical model used to evaluate changes in performance was recalibrated – effectively resetting the cumulative savings statistics back to zero.
When looking at weather-adjusted performance from Jan 2016 until now, MarketPlace Leichhardt has saved an additional $23,183 in electricity. This equates to an extra 97 t.C0₂-e of greenhouse gas emissions mitigated. The tracker graph shows the weather-adjusted performance during this period. Lines in red represent an increase in energy usage compared to baseline, and lines in green represent a decrease, or improvement. The dotted line shows the “moving average” saving which by the end of March had reached an average of 12%. A remarkable achievement that the entire MarketPlace Leichhardt team should be proud of.
