Financial incentivisation of sustainability and reduction in demand for unsustainable practices are central to progress in facilities management according to Paul Farrell.
Paul currently works as Associate Director of Engineering and Energy Service for Apleona, a provider of integrated facilities management based in Dublin and working with domestic and international partners as part of the global Apleona group.
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When it comes to the future of sustainable technologies, the answer is not black and white, with a company’s attitude to sustainable practices being directly impacted by their size.
“It depends on the size of the client. Are they a large corporate body? Are they an SME? Are they a small company? That will definitely colour their view of the importance of the topic.
“From the large corporate perspective, one of the big drivers now is investor confidence, green funds and the investor managers are constrained by what ethical companies can they invest in. You might have a fund that can’t invest in fossil fuel extraction.
“That is certainly becoming a driver for large corporates.”
Paul admits that he is seeing more of a push for sustainable guarantees in contracts. However, it was for a “large transaction”, thus emphasizing that company size is one of the factors in sustainable and renewable energy use in the industry.
Public Private Partnerships (PPP) are another area where work needs to be done, Paul believes.
“If we look at Public Private Partnerships. By their nature, they’re price sensitive, they tend to drive towards the lowest cost, be it initial capital cost or if you can get over the life cycle, even better.
“What you would find is that winning bids in PPP contracts would incorporate older technologies as they’re trying to hit the lowest price.
“So, you’ve got a brand-new building which isn’t efficient by modern standards. That’s purely a function of the contract structure and the bidding process.”
A lot of what Apleona strive for firstly preventing this kind of occurrence, but in the event of building inefficiency, bringing in new technologies to help bring a property up to standard.
“And the types of projects we would have completed in the past would be standard stuff like retiring of oil boilers, can we shift to LNG? Is there another opportunity to step out onto green LNG in the future? Can we go on to dual-fired in areas of the country where we don’t have the gas means? Can we get off gas altogether?”
While technologies are making these turnarounds possible, the best-case scenario for Paul is contracts coming with sustainable guarantees in place as well as agreements for a reduction in unsustainable options. This demand reduction is central to Apleona’s strategies.
“Demand reduction is a big part of our work.
“We have large corporate clients that we’ve done a lot of work on that front.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that the combination of a lot of efficiency savings and structured power purchasing has saved that particular company millions in the last 12 months.”
You can hear Paul and the rest of our panel speak more on emerging technologies for sustainability in FM on November 30th at 1pm. Register here.
