E110 - Marian Ferguson from Energy Lab

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Marion, thank you so much for joining us for this Green Element Podcast. I'm really looking forward to speaking to you, partly driven by the fact that we have been working with you on and off now for 2 years, 3 years. A client of ours introduced me to you, and it's amazing what you guys can do and how you can help organizations become more environmental. So could you tell us a bit about EnergyLab and what it is that you guys do there, please?

Hi, Will. Thank you for this opportunity to tell you a bit more about what we do. We're a building services design consultancy, and what that means is that we basically design the services that support a building's function, whether that building be a commercial office, whether it be a school, a hospital, a hotel, or residential. And not surprisingly, we have quite a big impact on the energy that a building will use. If you think about your air conditioning systems, your power systems, your lighting, these are all elements that we design. So, we have a responsibility to design that in the most sustainable way. So, at the heart of what EnergyLab do is sustainable building services design for clients, and to walk them through that process. Now, that building can be a brand new building, or it can be a heritage building, which has its own challenges, or very often we work in refurbished buildings, which, to be honest, is, is our favourite aspect of things because you've got an opportunity to improve something and actually reuse something rather than knock something down and build something up again. So that's at the heart of our business and what we do.

Brilliant. I mean, it's brilliant, and it's great that you just highlighted the reusing of buildings because our stock, as it were, our building stock, is the majority older buildings, isn't it? So we really need to understand how to make those older buildings more environmental.

Yes, and there's a lot of work now that's gathering momentum, and there's a lot of work within our industry to look at that now. You know, one of our frustrations and disappointments in our industry is kind of the throwaway culture. That, well, we've had that system for X number of years, let's throw it away, or this building, let's knock it down and let's build it again. And we tend not to come from that. Yes, if your systems and your building are old and inefficient and it's costing you more to try to keep them going, yes, let's look at new systems. But very often you can look and say, right, how can we refurbish this? How can we repurpose this? How can we reuse it? Because in our viewpoint, it's much more sustainable to keep something you've got and try to improve it than scrap everything, send it to waste, and then buy some new kit in. So, you know, it's an interesting scenario. And I think our industry has been a bit slow in catching on to this in comparison to, say, other industries in retail, for instance. But we're getting there.

I guess it's a bit like doing a lifecycle analysis, isn't it, on a building? When you're talking about— I'm now envisaging the, say, you know, those duct pipes and the duct— is it ducting?

Ductwork, yes.

Ductwork and all of that, all of the stuff that kind of the ins and outs of the building and how and the air conditioning and the heating and everything that goes on. And there is, okay, if you're taking it out, you are hopefully recycling it, but there's still that life cycle that should be brought into that, really, shouldn't it? And that's what you're saying you're bringing into your projects.

Definitely. I mean, there's a whole cost analysis that sits with that, but if you look at the bigger picture, and looking at the life cycle of a product, very often things like ductwork and pipework have got a much longer life than people anticipate, provided you've got to look after them. If you're poorly maintained, then, you know, that's an issue. But if you look after them, you know, your infrastructure can last for 40 years. Your equipment that's connected to it very often doesn't. And you have to take a view on that and where that goes, particularly when there's much more energy-efficient equipment out there at the moment. And for instance, there's a move away from gas-fired equipment now, where gas is now seen as being more of a polluter and kind of carbon-heavy now, and we're looking at much more electrical-based systems. So sometimes you have to look at that But if you've got a perfectly suitable gas-fired system in your building at the moment that still has 10 years left, we say, why take that out? Let's see how we can adapt that to use.

Okay, that's really interesting, and it is a big transition, isn't it? I was talking to my brother, who I wouldn't say is the most environmental of people, but interestingly, he's just done up his house and put pure electrics into his kitchen because of gas. And he's like, I could have put a gas stove in, but it didn't seem any point in it. And it was really heartening, and it was interesting to see someone that is just looking pragmatically at the future going, actually, this is what I should be doing.

Yeah.

Do you—

you've talked about the type of organisations that you work for, and it's a real cross-section because you said hospitals, schools. businesses and residential. There must be different drivers for each of those different organisations, or?

Definitely. If you're working on a commercial office, say for a developer/landlord, they've got a different driver because ultimately their tenants pay for their own electricity and gas bills, their own fuel bills. So sometimes it's not in the interest of the landlord to put a big capital cost to reduce running costs, and for a while there was a, you know, you had landlords who didn't care. Now you're seeing landlords, well, actually it's a good rental and selling point for my building, and it encourages tenants in when they say I've got an environmentally friendly building.

Mm.

When you're looking at residential, whether that be a residential block for, say, a housing association or individual houses, we do some individual houses as well, that's very much— that's people's own money, and so they're very conscious about, again, the life cycle. What do I need to pay out now? What's my payback? So there's slightly different drivers. And when you're actually looking at residential, it's somebody's home, they have an emotional attachment to it, so sometimes aesthetics are really, really strong. Whereas if you're looking at a commercial office, yes, you've got aesthetics as well, but there's, you know, there's other drivers about, are my tenants going to like it, how long will it last, and are spares available. So it's interesting. When you're looking at an educational establishment, again, it's something different. We have a mutual client with a university, but that university basically operates all year round, so doesn't have term times as such because they have other things going on. Their drivers are, what can I do in my very small timescale that I have? Because downtime just doesn't work. So you have to look at what products you can put in at that time, what expertise is available to put in that product. If it's a very new product, sometimes the expertise is not there. So lots of, you know, it's a very complex mesh. And so each project is almost bespoke, Will, where you've got to go and look and see, right, what's the driver behind this project and really understand what your client wants.

Yeah, I bet. Yeah, I bet. Here's a question for you that I'd love to— I can't— you've got new building and you are putting up a 5-storey building and everything new. And then you've got an older building and you are retrofitting it. The new one's got all the air conditioning, HVAC, heating, all new and everything, and the old one's got windows that you can open and it's a much older Victorian building. Which one should— is more— do you think is more environmental? Just off the top of your head and why?

Well, that's interesting because As a young engineer, I did a study on various ages of buildings and what was more environmentally friendly, and to be honest, the Victorians actually really got it right. They had natural ventilation, they had natural chimney stacks, they had actually quite a good construction process, and their windows were openable. but at a right, you know, a right size. When we went into the kind of post-World War II period where there was rapid build, I think we lost the plot a bit in terms of what we built. Very poor performing buildings, lots of damp problems, lots of drafty windows. People associate that with Victorian buildings, but actually the '50s and '60s construction really wasn't that great. What we're building now is super fabric-performing airtight buildings, which is great to a certain point, but what you're having to do is put mechanical ventilation in because they're so airtight. And sometimes in the summer you quite like a bit of a drafty building.

Hmm.

And so what happens is that you are you're having to probably put more ventilation, more aircon than you would normally have done in an older building. So I would say both ends of the spectrum have got the good ideas, the middle or mid-century stuff, rubbish. My personal preference, I think the Victorians got it right actually.

It's funny you say that because that's my gut feeling is that Because we, as you know, look at the energy usage in buildings. And we've, over the last 20-odd years, we've had quite a few companies that have moved from old buildings to new. And I'm always flabbergasted on how much energy the bills go up. And they're told by architects, oh, it's going to be much cheaper to run. It's going to— and we've got clients going, no, it's not. It's actually more expensive to run now, and we're paying more rent, and we had to pay for the building, and we had to— so actually the whole thing is more costly to us. And then all the staff complain because they can't open the windows because they, they're used to opening the windows. And, and I— and we tried to show, um, we did a— with the filter in an air conditioning, and it was a client in central London, and in order to I guess prove our point of why we moved buildings. We showed what a filter would look like after a week. I think it was a week, but it was black. Whatever it was, it was, and it was a short amount of time. And we're like, that's the reason why we don't want the windows open. You do, you don't want to have that in your lungs. And but I still, I don't know. And I think that's why it's really interesting talking to someone that's actually an expert in this.

I mean, there's a lot of really sophisticated controls for new buildings now, Will, that, you know, ramps, plan up and down, whether you— it depends on occupancy, you know, it measures CO2, it measures pollutants, and can actually reduce the consumption of your equipment in relation to occupancy. They're great when they work and they're set up correctly, not so good when they don't. But if you think in the older buildings, you switched your heating on, you switched your heating off, you opened your windows, you closed your windows, and not very sophisticated, but actually gave you a reasonable comfortable environment and were actually not too bad in terms of energy consumption.

Hmm. Yeah, and I think that's it, isn't it? It's that, and then it's where do you buy your energy from? And it becomes a much more complicated picture as we make our buildings more complicated. Because it—

yeah, I'm—

because I'm going to bring in the Passive House theory, and that— because that seems to bridge a gap, doesn't it?

Yes, it does. It's a bit— I mean, it's a very specialized field And you've got to be very careful that you get that right. But, and there's, you know, there's very few people who actually really understand it. There's a lot of talk about it.

Right.

But there's very few people that really understand it. It's not something that we are expert on by any means, because we see that there's, you know, it is a very complex, it's a very complex thing, and you have got to get it right. But as a principle, it's a great principle.

Okay, interesting. And what sort of best practices have you seen in your time doing what you're doing?

Well, I'm seeing people being much more aware of the control of their systems and that being really important to them. So people now really understand if I've got a floor in my office building that's only 50% occupied, why am I using 100% of my equipment all of the time? So, people are much more aware of that, and that's something that we really focus on, is trying to match what your equipment is doing to your occupancy and your use of your space.

Yeah.

And that's that tighter control will certainly make a big impact on your energy consumption. So, the whole control piece, I think, is something that really has moved on and is now getting much more traction in our industry. That it's fine having really energy-efficient equipment, but if you just run it ridiculously 24/7, it's not going to help you.

Yeah, okay. And so you— because you almost need a master's in some of the energy management software systems that you see nowadays in buildings, don't you? And I do feel a bit sorry for facilities, people in facilities, because they've suddenly got to get to grips with— but if they do get to grips with it, they really do get to grips with the environment of their building, don't they?

Yeah, absolutely. It's important that they understand they don't need to, you know, they don't really need to know the technicalities behind it, but what they need to understand is what the whole objectives are and why they're doing it. And I think, you know, the training that facilities managers are given when they take over a building and the BMS engineer tells them, you know, he spends a couple of hours with them showing them this really complex system and then walks away. I think training is really important, and I don't know if you've heard of soft landings, but it's a process that's through the industry, and it aims to engage users, end users, facilities managers, from the very inception of the design of the building right through the process to where it gets handed over, so that they really understand why decisions are made on their building and what What they're— how the building's supposed to operate, and that's really, really important so that they then, when the building is handed over to them, they go, right, I understand now why we've done this and how I need to operate my building. And I think that's really, really important.

I think that's a— that is, yeah, I can see that being a key takeaway message from this, to be honest with you, because we see it from, you know, the end of Well, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to do it. And they— and we then get brought in as consultants to help them manage those buildings. But I can see it's that disempowerment, isn't it, of not understanding?

Mm-hmm.

And if your skill and expertise is not in the design of the fabric of the building, then why would you naturally understand straight away how it works. And I can see what you're talking about massively helping people in facilities, and that's brilliant. That's really— so soft play, soft landings, soft landing, and say that to a 2-year-old.

But what is really good as well is that the facilities team or the end users are engaged in the process, and they say, well, this is actually how I use it. you know, I use this space 7 till 10 AM, and I use that space 3 to 4 PM. You know, I'm pulling things out of the air, but then, then a designer can go, right, okay, I can design that to control that flexibly. Or they say, or you say, you know, we do have evening events, so we need to be able to condition our space out of hours, or we only, we only operate in a morning on a Friday, for instance. Getting all of that through, otherwise what engineers do and designers do they just revert to type and say, well, this is the kind of standard way we design, so this is what we'll do Monday to Friday, and this is what we'll do. Whereas it's really important to understand how an end user uses their building. That's really important when it comes to operating your building in an efficient and sustainable way, and I'm really surprised at how many people still don't get that.

Yes, so am I, so am I, which is why I can see how important it is. I can see the passion in you. I know this is audio, but I can see the gesticulation going on and the kind of the passion that's coming through.

Thank you.

Would you say that people are driven by cost or environments, or, you know, when they come to you, what sort of— what are the conversations around? Is it, I just really want to have a really good system designed by you, or do people bring the environment and sustainability into conversations?

Yes, they do, but very often when they start to look at cost, they take the short-term view. and go, oh, I didn't realise it was going to cost me that much. But people are starting to, you know, change their attitudes towards that. So most people will come to us because they want a really good system designed for their building, and they understand that we'll take the time to engage with them and find out what they really want. And so we'll design something for them that will work for them. Inevitably, there's a cost discussion that goes on, and 99.9% of our projects have a budget that have to be adhered to. And sometimes the client's aspirations exceed his budget, exceed the pocket— how deep his pockets are. But for me, the challenge is not to dampen that enthusiasm a client comes to you with, which is, well, I want to have a really good system, I want it to be energy efficient, I want to— I'm interested in the health and wellbeing of the end users of this building, but I only have a limited budget. You know, our challenge is, right, okay, what can we do for that? But Different clients have different drivers. If you're an owner-occupier and you're a high-wealth individual in your house, you're not too worried about that. You want the best, you want the best for you. But if you're running a commercial property and you've got a service charge budget to keep to, then You know that cost is an issue. Okay.

And do you see people talking about carbon and talking about the ongoing, I guess, calculations for buildings? So when they've come up against the barrier of, it's going to cost us more to put this in, do they Do you feel that people are still going, actually, we are thinking about the carbon footprint or whatever of the business ongoing?

They're actually yes and no, yes and no. They do know about it, they are interested in it, but I think there's a lot of kind of misinformation And people say, oh, this carbon calculation, and can you look at some paybacks for me? And they think it's, you know, it's something that's a quick fix. It's actually quite complex, as you know, because there's lots of things that you've got to look at and get involved if you're really informing the client of what the whole life cycle cost is and what the whole carbon impact is. So, our clients generally come to the party, if you like, with, I want to reduce my carbon, but when the capital cost starts to creep up, they go, right, okay, I might not think about that too much because maybe I'll sell this building in 5 years, or maybe we'll move out of here in 5 years. What I am seeing now is things like much shorter leases. So it used to be when you signed a lease for a commercial building, you signed up for 15, 20 years, and therefore that landlord had you in there, and then that gave you much longer payback periods. Now there's much, you know, you get much more flexible leases. There's 5 years, there's 3 years, you know, there's what some landlords are offering, 1-year breaks for clients. Because the market's so tough at the moment. And so they're not necessarily— if somebody thinks it's only going to sit there for maybe 1 or 2 years, they won't necessarily see the payback on that.

I guess it may turn around. I mean, I'm just now kind of hypothesising about it, but thinking if I was a business wanting to move into a building for a year, I would think, okay, my energy should be, say, £130,000 for electricity, £60,000-£70,000 for gas to heat it, and then the rent is that. I don't know, I can't. But you would add the— if you were looking at it, you would add the whole lot together, and if you found that your heating was actually £20,000 and your electricity was 30-40% of the £130,000, so say £90,000, you could then— you would be happy to be paying slightly more in rent, which means that the person that's renting it out to you could put the thing, put the stuff in and make it more efficient.

Yeah.

And I wonder if that will start to trickle through with that kind of thinking, because if I'm thinking that, and I know I'm thinking from an environmental point of view, but we are looking at office space at Green Element and Compare Your Footprint, and so that's the kind of conversations I'm having with people.

Yeah, yeah, I'm starting to see that coming through. I think you're right, I think that will start to come through. We had a discussion with a landlord today who recognises that his building's not particularly energy efficient, They haven't really bothered about it before because the tenants pick up the bill, but they're saying, right, okay, there's a— we're now getting some pressure from our tenants going, what are you doing to reduce this? So they're now starting to look at investing in a bit better controls, looking at the systems that they use, because they're now getting pressure.

It comes down a lot— it always surprises me how much of everything comes down to communication. And we're— I mean, we're now talking about the communications between landlords and tenants, aren't we? And the relationship that can be formed between them and working together. And then it comes down to transparency. And I guess if a tenant is seeing that the person, their landlord, is putting more environmental processes in place for their building, And then they can see that actually their energy is going to go down on that, then there's a conversation to be had. And maybe that's where we're going to go, is more transparency. I remember one of the first projects I worked with a client, and do you remember people didn't like consultants looking at electricity prices in buildings? And I remember looking at a building and they were being charged something like 45, 50p per kilowatt hour. When in reality it was about 10, 12p per kilowatt hour. And the landlord was so reticent to give us the energy bills, and then suddenly we found out why. And obviously the client was like, what? We are literally being charged 4 or 5 times more than we should have been. And you don't see that anymore, but it just shows the journey that we've—

Yeah, it's much more transparent now, and, you know, there's much more tenant-landlord communication now. There used to be, it's like your landlord really didn't want to speak to his tenants anymore, but we're seeing much more visibility now and transparency, which is good. It's just a good thing anyway to do.

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. And the key takeaways I'm taking from talking to you, if I was listening to this podcast, is talk to your landlords, have communications with them, trying to understand how you can help them ensure that your building you're in is more environmental with your costs not going up either way. And if you have building management systems in place and software to help you manage your building, Go and talk to your landlord about how you can manage and run those systems, so therefore you are more in control of the processes that you have in your domain, as it were.

Yes, definitely. You know, get set up that line of communication with your landlord, whether that be through their managing agent or your regular landlord-tenant meetings, but definitely talk to your landlord about it. And if your landlord isn't interested in it, well, put the real pressure on that they need to get interested in it, because this is a really important element of reducing our energy costs and our carbon footprint, if you like. Offices, hospitals, schools, all the buildings make such an impact on energy usage and on our planet, we really need to, collectively, where we can, try and do something about that.

Are you finding the conversations have changed since COVID has come into play, or are the conversations still similar to what pre-COVID?

Probably the emphasis is a bit more on how do we keep COVID safe, as opposed to how do we make this building energy efficient?

Right.

So, that has been more the driver, and what makes a building COVID safe sometimes flies in the face of what makes a building energy efficient. So, for instance, operating your mechanical ventilation 24/7 is a very good way of keeping your, obviously, the air quality high and less risk, but it's not very good for your energy bills. But so there's a, you know, there's a balance, there's a balance to be had with that, I think.

We've gone back to opening the windows, haven't we? I know a client of mine said that they actually got all their windows made to be opened again because they had windows open at one end and the other end, so there was a free flow of Yeah, because they've been informed that that was the best way for them to do it.

I've looked at a number of buildings for clients who are keen to go back into their offices to see what can we do to improve that, and in some of the older buildings that may be converted warehouses, Victorian buildings that you see around London, it is opening the windows and having a through draft just Like the Victorians meant you to do it.

Brilliant, I love it. And we've not really talked about EnergyLab at all, and you are a B Corp?

We are moving towards B Corp. Unfortunately, COVID-19 got in the way, um, and we had to shift focus a bit, as, as a lot of businesses had to do. So, right, how are we going to get through this? So, um, It's not gone away, but we've not advanced as far as we would like, so we're still going to do that, yeah.

I mean, in essence, it's there and it doesn't matter. It's a purpose-driven business at the end of the day, doesn't it? You don't need to have a badge to prove that. And from a sustainability point of view, do you practice what you preach?

Oh, definitely, definitely. It would be really wrong not to. We do. We have— well, what COVID has actually shown us is that we don't need a big office, and we're reducing our office footprint, if you like. We always worked in a flexible way, but we're working much more flexibly now. We've had a look at our suppliers with help of you know, some of our peers. We've looked at some of the supply chains we use, for instance, for stationery, for maintenance equipment, that type of thing, and asking them the questions, okay, what are you doing? How's your business run? And really interrogating that. We've pressured our landlord to do something about our energy supplier, so we're all renewables. So our own business processes, very much so, But we're also conscious that the biggest impact that we have is through the designs we deliver for our projects, and that's the biggest impact that we can make. So, we make sure that everyone is really aware of what the industry has to offer, aware of products, everybody's trained, but sustainable design is embedded in what we do. We don't do a design and then somebody does a sustainability check on it. It's embedded in what we do.

Brilliant, brilliant. Well, thank you so much for being on today, Marion. It's, um, it's always a pleasure talking to you, but, um, I love— yeah, and getting that knowledge. And I know that we've probably only touched upon a tiny bit of what you guys do at Energy Liaison, haven't we? And I feel I haven't done you service for all the work that you complete for clients. But thank you for being on.

Thank you, Will. It was, it was great to share our enthusiasm for what we do with you. Thank you for that.

I hope you enjoyed that episode. Next week we've got Ellen Vandermuth. She's the CEO of Off the Fence. She's the CEO of a new startup, the Water Bear Network, which is what we're going to be talking about, and chair to the Jackson Wild Film Festival. She's absolutely fascinating lady who has been doing, putting together documentaries and filming documentaries for the last, I think, 25, 30 years. And the Water Bear Network is a new platform for us to be able to watch and see and Review and documentaries all around the Sustainable Development Goals. How cool is that? I can't wait for you to hear the conversation that we had with her. And remember, please, if you like this podcast, can you definitely go and review us and hopefully press 5 stars? If you press 1 star, could you tell us why? Because we really want to know how to improve. our podcast. And again, if you'd like to join our community, sustainabilitysolve.org, please come along, get into the conversations with old podcast guests, new podcast guests, trying to understand that environmental impact, looking at that carbon footprint reporting. Come and talk to us. We love talking about sustainability and the environment as a whole.