This guide is intended to provide information and raise awareness about initiatives that can help property owners or managers reduce energy costs and cut emissions for their buildings.

This handbook aims to identify initiatives that you won’t find in the current National Construction Code (NCC), helping to promote best practice energy performance in the property sector.

In the office sector, best practice projects are readily able to achieve a 5.5 star NABERs Energy rating. Three buildings have already achieved a 6 star NABERs Energy rating without any Green Power contribution.

It’s also important to recognise that buildings designed now, for completion in two or three years, will enter a market where they will be competing with an increasing volume of higher performance building stock.

Some projects are even pursuing a target of ‘Net Zero Energy’ – whereby any energy drawn from the grid is offset in full by clean energy generated on site and exported to the grid over the course of a year.

The initiatives outlined in this handbook will encourage building owners to be more ambitious about the energy performance of their buildings, helping to reduce costs and position their assets for a low carbon future.

This handbook is also intended to help the market adapt to the rapid and continuous changes to technology and industry practice. For example, in the past five years LED lighting and EC (electronically commutated) fans have leapt from the fringe to standard practice in many buildings. Solar photovoltaic systems have also reached a tipping point, with the number of large scale installations planned increasing rapidly over the past 12 months.

The 50 initiatives in this handbook have been grouped in a way that acknowledges the specialised design professionals required to design and incorporate them in practice.