Net Zero Bank Building in Singapore
As Southeast Asia’s largest bank, DBS is committed to support Asia’s transition to a low-carbon economy. This includes their own buildings. This is how they decided to retrofit their iconic 30 year old building.
As Southeast Asia’s largest bank, DBS is committed to support Asia’s transition to a low-carbon economy. This includes real estate as DBS supports their clients to enhance their building efficiencies, including building retrofits.
However, retrofitting is not always the more sustainable option. Carbon emissions has to be considered across the entire building’s lifecycle. This includes embodied carbon from construction and also operational carbon through daily operations, which can be 50% of a building’s carbon emissions.
This is why the decision to demolish and rebuild or to retrofit the 30-year old DBS Newton Green has to be data-driven. DBS needed to know how far they could go to improve performance with various green technologies if they decided to retrofit.
The first step is to baseline their existing energy consumption. To do this, they submetered their energy consumption throughout the building. Using ENX Sustainability Suite, this enables them to optimize energy consumption by tracking details of what, when, and how energy is used. This gets the different stakeholders of staff and vendors on the same page to visualize and analyze their current energy usage at a granular level.
DBS also implemented advance demand based strategy through the use of occupancy management and analytics to optimize energy use across the entire building.
Solar energy is also integrated into energy management to provide a complete view of their energy consumption and production and to establish whether Net Zero has been achieved.
After the retrofit works, DBS Newton Green achieved 90% reduction in EUI, becoming Singapore’s first Net Zero Bank building in Singapore. See the real time energy performance of DBS Newton Green here
With ENX Sustainability Suite, DBS continues to push the green boundaries, implementing cutting edge building technologies to achieve their net zero goals while supporting the real estate industry by sharing their journey of innovation and building transformation.
DBS is Southeast Asia’s largest bank with presence in 18 markets. DBS Newton Green is a 30-year-old, 4-storey office building with ~3500m2 GFA in Singapore housing 400 employees .
