Kennedy Associates Architects are a medium sized architectural firm employing thirteen people.  The office undertakes a variety of projects from residential additions through to multi unit residential, small to medium scale commercial projects, community projects, urban design, thermal simulation and building research.  The work of the office has been widely published and has won numerous architectural awards including the Sulman award for public architecture for the Bowden Centre at Mt Annan Botanic Garden.  The office is renowned for it's integration of environmental considerations and rigourous pursuit of beauty.  The directors Steve Kennedy and Anthony Nolan contribute widely to the architectural community through ongoing participation in various professional organisations and education.

The office is typical of most modern architectural practices in that we rely heavily on computers and other electronic equipment such as printers, copiers and phones.  The office tenancy is also fairly typical with a fair reliance on electric lighting and the provision of air conditioning.

Why did we become involved

We believe that climate change is the single most important issue challenging humanity and we welcome the opportunity to explore ways to reduce our carbon emissions.  As an office we felt that we were already doing the obvious things that we could do to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions such as turning computers off at night, and rarely using the air conditioner, but we didn't really know which areas of the office operations made the greatest contributions, and which ones could be improved furthest.

Where did we start

The question of where to draw the boundary on the carbon emissions that we were to measure, and an exploration of the data that was available were the starting points for our study.   We also set out with the philosophy that we would seek to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions firstly before explore mechanisms to offset our usage.

Process undertaken and problems faced

In setting the boundary our philosophy was to be as wide as possible in the scope of emissions that we considered but the process of getting there is in practice to consider what will be excluded.  For example we deliberately decided that staff travel to and from work would not be included as we felt that to do so would be an invasion of privacy and it was something that the office could not control.  We also decided to exclude staff food from the study for similar reasons.

Work that was undertaken outside of the office such as advocacy was excluded from the study as it was assumed to be covered within the boundary of the organisations for whom advocacy was undertaken.  

In terms of data that was available we found that some obvious data such as distance travelled by taxi was not readily available based upon current record keeping, some data was aggregated and could not readily be applicable to our office such as water use spread over several tenancies, and much of the data required for the study was dispersed and therefore time consuming to gather such as distance travelled by private car and air travel.  

In the end time constraints meant that for this stage of the study we ended up narrowing our focus to the most reliable data that we had, being paper and electricity use.  The decision to exclude travel was regrettable but we were starting form a good base here as bike riding was widespread and air travel almost non-existent.  Excluding travel at this stage enabled us to focus on what we believed to be the largest contributors to our greenhouse gas emissions.  Noting that the first assessment of this type is the most time consuming future assessments should include travel.

Data available for electricity was of an aggregated nature and further work was required to understand the contribution of items such as lighting, air conditioning, hot water, computers, etc.  This work involved cataloguing all of the equipment that was in use, the power consumption of each appliance and a profile of use in order to establish an estimate energy use.   This task proved to be the more difficult than expected, primarily because the data was within an inconsistent form, and also because the data was in many cases physically difficult to access as it was often at the back of the equipment or within the ceiling space.  It was also difficult for example to monitor the hours of use of the water heater as there was no obvious indicator of energy use.

Data was also collected from a plug in electricity meter that was fitted to individual appliances or groups of appliances over a period of time.  This data was the most reliable as it was not subject to the assumptions built into the above process.  For example energy use reported on the back of the appliances might be an average figure or peak figure, but it's often not possible to tell, hour of operation can be vague, the meter largely overcomes these problems.

There were several areas for which there was no agreed method of accurately collecting data, such as methane from rubbish, and CO2 from toner cartridges or printer inks, and they were also excluded form the study at this stage.

Some data such as electricity use could be collected based on long term records and this enabled some establishment of trends over the longer term as opposed to the snapshot approach of detailed analysis above.

Where are we now

The data that we collected indicated that our electricity and paper use were relatively consistent over the past years, and could not readily be attributable to the staff number in the office.  

The greatest single use of electricity in the office was for the lighting.  The result was initially surprising as everyone tends to think of fluorescent light fittings as being low energy use but when you have a lot of them, and they are on all day every day, they can contribute a significant proportion of total energy use.

There was also some evidence of a seasonal cycle of fluctuations in energy use but this will require further analysis as the fluctuations cannot be attributed to air conditioning alone.  In the end air conditioning use was not as large a component of electricity use as imagined.  There was also a surprisingly large energy use in winter.  Air Conditioning use has increased over the years, possibly as we have become more familiar with it.

The data collected from the back of the appliances varied dramatically from the energy use measured by the plug on meter and this has caused some confusion in the results.  It is hoped that further use of the meter should enable a better fit between the measured energy use identified on the electricity bills and our predicted electricity use based on the product data.

The kitchen area appears to be a surprisingly high proportion of energy use but on reflection this was not so surprising when considering that there is a refrigerator, hot water unit, as well as kettle and coffee unit and microwave.  

The electricity use for computers does not appear to be a large proportion of use, and printers seem to be a very small energy use.

The radio that powered the hold music for the telephone hold function used a very small amount of power.

Paper use showed a declining trend, and was mostly constant throughout the year.  Greenhouse gas emissions attributable to paper were close to that of the computer use.

Where are we going

The office has just gone through a major computer upgrade, and is about to relocate, meaning that there are several opportunities to improve energy use, particularly through the new fitout and an emphasis on reducing the use of artificial lighting.

Establishing the methodology to monitor our greenhouse gas emissions has enabled us to focus our efforts to reduce those emissions in a targeted fashion.

The exercise of measuring emissions at this stage should make it easier to measure them in the future.

We want to undertake further analysis on the data that has been collected to refine the accuracy of the measurements.

We want to widen the scope of greenhouse has  emissions that have been measured through the inclusion of sources such as travel.

We need to investigate our options for purchasing carbon offsets for the greenhouse gas emissions that we have not been able to eliminate, and commit to ongoing offsets.