50 Flinders Street, Adelaide

Overview

Located in the heart of Adelaide city, 50 Flinders Street is a prominent A-Grade building providing state-of-the-art oce accommodation. This 15 level commercial tower provides 21,750sqm of NLA and features an on site creche, two levels of carparking, and ground floor retail tenancies.

The goal: Improving energy efficiency

50 Flinders Street was initially designed and built in 2015 to achieve a 5 Star NABERS Energy rating. Crucial to the design and development of this building for the owner Cbus Property and the building manager CBRE, was the incorporation of the latest initiatives in sustainability and efficiency to ensure optimised indoor environment quality, optimal tenant comfort conditions and improved environmental efficiency. The building required an enhanced Building Management System (BMS) that would provide an optimal working environment for its tenants as well as ongoing opportunities for improvements in energy efficiency.

The solution: Strategies for energy efficiency improvements

Leading Edge Automation (trading as Conservia in Australia) simplified building monitoring and analysis complexity at 50 Flinders Street by installing a BMS that integrated all systems, devices, software and services into one platform for total visibility and control of their operation. The BMS was designed to optimise building performance and extend equipment and system life through reducing loads and operating hours, as well as improve alarming and remove system inefficiencies through correct BMS configuration with an adequate number of correctly located monitoring points. Following construction we were engaged for ongoing maintenance and fine-tuning of the building to provide expert analysis of improvement opportunities and enhancements within the HVAC systems.

Strategies for energy efficiency improvements:

• Air handling units (AHU) optimisation
• AHU’s supply air temperature reset
• Optimised cooling & heating call settings
• Chilled water system staging
• High & low temperature chilled water setpoint reset
• AHU’s supply air static pressure reset
• Chiller plant optimisation
• Reheat coils control
• Passive chilled beam A/C system
• Indoor Environment Quality (IEQ) reporting

NABERS IEQ Reporting Tool

Utilising the NABERS IEQ reporting tool developed by Optergy, we provided a simplified tool to allow CBRE to undertake deeper onsite analysis of their performance and spend their time and effort gathering reports more effectively. The IEQ tool uses normal trendlogs to measure and report on thermal services, including temperature, mean radiant temperature, humidity and air speed, in accordance with NABERS IE guidelines.

The results:

Enhanced Environment Quality

The BMS has played a major role in identifying and implementing optimisation strategies throughout the building. This has lead to an improvement in occupant comfort conditions and tenant productivity. With system inefficiencies being reduced, there has also been a reduction in landlord and tenant costs.

Improved NABERS Ratings

Improved NABERS Rating Through fine-tuning the building’s subsystems and energy consumption in such detail, 50 Flinders Street was able to achieve a dramatic reduction in gas and electricity consumption allowing them to reach their targeted energy goals. They have since continued to exceed their design expectations and achieve extraordinary high level environmental results.

Exceeding Energy Expectation

In the first two NABERS rating periods the building achieved consecutive 5.5 Star Energy ratings and in its third rating period in 2019, it became South Australia’s first building to achieve the 6 Star NABERS Energy rating for ‘base building’ energy use – the highest rating that can be achieved under the ratings system. Further building tuning has resulted in the building being the only property in Australia to achieve 6 for both Energy & Indoor Environment without purchasing green power two years in a row.