The tangible benefits of sustainable buildings certified under BEAM-Plus are mainly derived from savings in energy, which can be reflected in the savings in electricity bills.
Some policy implications can be drawn from this study findings:
• More incentives should be provided to developers who do not operate the buildings for the implementation of sustainable measures.
• More education campaigns are needed to promote BEAM-Plus among general public.
• A more mature market of construction and waste recycling should be developed.
There are also a number of intangible benefits associated with BEAM-Plus certified sustainable buildings. For example, the obtaining of daylighting credits can help boost the productivity of building occupants.
• Recommend the design strategy to adopt lower window-to-wall ratio.
Buildings are responsible for 60 per cent of the carbon footprint in Hong Kong. Building energy constitutes 90% of the city’s total primary energy consumption, which generates a large amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In recognition of this staggering statistics, creating a sustainable built environment is an indispensable element of the current and future policies for energy saving and GHG emission reduction. This project attemps to reveal the costs and benefits of BEAM-Plus certified sustainable buildings in Hong Kong.
This project embraces five main objectives:
• To identify the economic and environmental benefits and non-economic obstacles of achieving BEAM-Plus V2.0 grades;
• To estimate the costs and benefits of obtain creditss under BEAM-Plus with due regards to initial costs, lifecycle costs and operational cost associated with a new sustainable building development;
• To investigate the extent to which various grades under BEAM-Plus can provide economic incentives for developers in terms of energy efficiency, building performance, and other social and environmental aspects of sustainability;
• To explore whether developers’ motivations and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for achieving different performance grades;
BEAM-Plus (formerly HKBEAM) was firstly launched by Hong Kong Green Building Council (HKGBC) in December 1996. It is a voluntary assessment scheme and all-inclusive environmental assessment tool for built environment impact of a building. The voluntary recognition scheme encourages developers to include requirements that are advantageous to building occupants and built environment in the building design. Up to date, over 2000 new and existing buildings out of 50,000 building stock in Hong Kong have been assessed under BEAM-Plus Scheme. Under the current structure of BEAM-Plus V2.0, a credit and scoring system is adopted. Basically, there are five different performance grades, namely, Unclassified, Bronze (40% Score), Silver (55% Score), Gold (65% Score), and Platinum (75% Score), with Platinum as the highest grade.
• To develop effective sustainable design strategies for developers and designers to obtain different BEAM-Plus performance grades for a new building development or a major work of addition or alteration.
The cost implications of BEAM-Plus credits can be divided in to 6 categories. Even when targeting at a Platinum grade, all credits to be earned fall into either Negative (with monetary saving), 0 (no additional cost), or 0+ (insignificant cost impact) categories. In fact, reuse of building structure can provide huge monetary savings in initial cost despite it may not be feasible for every building development project. On the other hand, implementation of energy saving measures, e.g. LED, may yield saving in life cycle cost. Reducing the window-to-wall ratio can provide both savings in initial and life cycle cost.
A Flow Chart Showing the Adopted Methodology Protocol