Singapore's Most Energy Efficient Office by 2018

Would a suite of energy-efficient heating technology that works well in continental Europe translate well in cooling buildings in the hot and humid climate? The 3for2 project, which focuses largely on air-conditioning technologies, eventually found its place in Singapore, where air-conditioning accounts for approximately 60% of energy consumption across buildings.

“We came equipped with our ‘European’ concepts of heating and cooling for moderate climates, well aware that the climatic context in Singapore is much more demanding and extreme. While in our climate we are used to the oscillation of hot and cold, of dry and humid periods, the tropical climate in Singapore is constantly hot and humid, making this the ‘worst-case scenario’ for creating comfortable interior spaces,” says Professor Arno Schlueter, Leader of the 3for2 Project and Professor of Architecture and Building Systems at ETH Zurich.

After four years of applied research, today, the 550 m² ‘3for2@UWCSEA’ head office of the United World College South East Asia (UWCSEA) stands as a living laboratory of the ‘3for2’ applied research project led by ETH Zurich in partnership with Siemens Building Technologies and UWCSEA. The project is the pilot implementation of the ‘3for2’ building design concept developed by architectural and engineering researchers at the Singapore-ETH Centre, a joint research centre established by ETH Zurich and Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF).

The ‘3for2’ concept, which integrates design and construction, offers a paradigm shift in the way sustainable high-rise buildings can be realised, especially in the rapidly urbanizing regions of Asia. It proposes that new lean and energy-efficient technologies for air-conditioning and related services can be successfully integrated into building structures, thereby saving not only energy, but also considerable space and materials.

“Despite decades of technology development, widespread deployment of highly energy-efficient and compact air-conditioning technologies in the commercial building sector has not yet occurred outside of a few European countries. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them being the nature of the construction market and building design practices. Air-conditioning technologies are typically selected during the building design stage by developers and their consultants, who will not bear the cost of a building’s future energy consumption. It’s difficult to convince developers to invest in these highly efficient air-conditioning systems if they don’t benefit from the long-term rewards of lower energy bills.” says Professor Arno Schlueter, Leader of the 3for2 Project and Professor of Architecture and Building Systems at ETH Zurich. He adds, “the 3for2 concept attempts to address these split incentives by proposing a holistic design concept that saves materials, space, and energy. These more sustainable buildings help developers to lower construction costs and increase tenable floor areas, while enabling tenants to benefit from significantly lower utility bills.”

To explore the viability of the ‘3for2’ high-rise building concept, in 2014 Professor Schlueter’s team established a joint partnership with Siemens Building Technologies and Singapore’s UWCSEA – one of the world’s largest international schools – to develop a single-floor pilot implementation of the concept called ‘3for2@UWCSEA’. Over a rapid 18-month period, researchers from ETH Zürich were tasked with overseeing the design and construction of the 550 m² pilot office space within the UWCSEA’s new 20,000 m² building. The completed 3for2@UWCSEA space now stands as a living laboratory of the ‘3for2’ concept, with researchers conducting a two-year programme on the performance evaluation and optimisation of the installed technologies.

For Siemens Building Technologies, as the project’s key industry partner and funder, the project presented an opportunity to engage with new advances in academic research on building systems, and share their expertise as a developer of intelligent building automation systems (BAS) for the Asia Pacific region. In particular, in the 3for2@UWCSEA project, Siemens installed its pioneering building management system Desigo CC, with over 1,000 sensor and control points feeding data into a web-accessible server at one-minute intervals.

Mr Helmut Macht, CTO of Siemens Building Technologies, said “Singapore, with forward-thinking ‘lead users’ like UWCSEA, provides the perfect environment to research and pilot-test energy-efficient innovative technologies and control strategies which will later be applied to high-density urban markets in tropical climates around the world.” Mr Peter Halliday, Head of Siemens Building Technologies ASEAN added, “We have seen this project grow from conceptualization to implementation and it has become a shining example of how much potential really lies within the green building sector. Siemens will continue to support UWCSEA and the industry in discovering new possibilities which raise the bar for green buildings in Asia Pacific”.

In December 2015, the 3for2@UWCSEA space became fully-occupied by its long-term occupants, the administrative staff and management of the UWCSEA.  Since then, the project’s researchers have been combing through early performance data. This data now shows that, across three weeks of operation in December, the energy consumption of the 3for2@UWCSEA office space was already amongst the lowest 10% of large office buildings in the office buildings in the country.

However, “these are very early days”, says Dr Adam Rysanek, Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich and Project Manager of the 3for2@UWCSEA. “While we are pleased to see that our system is already performing among the most energy-efficient office buildings in Singapore, a number of our key performance objectives will only be realised towards the end of the project in two years’ time. Based on these initial performance indicators, we should be able to lower our energy footprint by a further 40% upon fine tuning the systems we’ve already installed – and installing some new ones by 2018.”

Indeed, while the launch of the 3for2@UWCSEA project on 19 January 2016 represented the culmination of a successful design, construction, and commissioning phase that spanned 1.5 years, it was in fact a turning point into the project’s core research phase. “As researchers into energy-efficient buildings, we have been presented with an incredible research opportunity with the 3for2@UWCSEA project in Singapore,” said Dr Rysanek. “Not in many places in the world has it been possible for academic researchers to try and study so many new ideas in a real-world setting.”