Speech by Minister Lawrence Wong at the Joint Opening Ceremony of the IGBC, BEX and MCE Asia 2016
Sep 7, 2016
A very good morning to all of you and welcome to Singapore Green Building Week (SGBW) 2016. To all our overseas guests and friends, a very warm welcome to Singapore as well, and I hope you enjoy your time here.
I am very happy to join you for this joint opening ceremony which involves three different events – a conference and two expos. And in fact, these three events complement each other very well. At the Conference, you will get a chance to hear from international thought leaders on their ideas and new technologies for the green building movement. At the two expos, you get to see how these ideas are in fact being translated into practical applications and solutions. These are three relevant events, complementing one another, and I hope you will find a useful time here, making full use of the different activities that are taking place.
This year, the theme of our Green Building Week is on the future. As the theme says, it is about our next decade and the efforts that we need to take to advance our green building movement over the next ten years. So we will have particular focus on new technologies, on what we should be doing in the next few years to really take steps forward and advance our green building agenda.
Our Green Building Journey
But even as we look ahead, it is important also to think about the past, and to recognise and reflect on how we have made progress to get to where we are today. Certainly for us in Singapore, we have seen a remarkable transformation in our built environment over the last 50 years. 50 years ago when we became independent, our tallest building was the former Asia Insurance Building. It was 20 storeys high and it was also the tallest building in South East Asia then – this is 1965. Today, even our public housing buildings are much taller than this. Even normal buildings in Singapore are much taller than 20 storeys, but then, it was cutting edge. So just in terms of height, we have made tremendous progress.
In our early years, we needed to focus on basic needs. One of the key priorities for Singapore then was to make sure that our buildings were structurally sound, just to make sure that they were safe. So we focused on safety, we focused on the quality of building materials, on the building process and I think we have made good progress in these areas.
But over time as we’ve worked on buildings, we’ve realised that we not only need to build safer and stronger, but we also need to build smarter and greener. And that is why we have made progress, and we have taken steps to change and to move towards green buildings, and I think we have come quite a ways in this journey as well.
Today, around one third of our buildings are green. Our Green Mark certification schemes are used in over 80 cities around the world. And Singapore is recognised as one of the leading cities in the world for our green building efforts.
We are also working not just within Singapore but also with international partners around the world to broaden our efforts. For example with have programmes and cooperation efforts with the United Nations, the United National Environment Programme. Bilaterally, we have very good cooperation with many countries in South East Asia, certainly, within Asia we have good tie ups with China, India, and even beyond Asia, with other countries as well. I am very glad that later during this week, the BCA will be signing an MOU with the Rwanda Housing Authority as well.These are exchanges that we have through multi-lateral institutions like the United Nations, but also bilaterally with countries around us, so that we can continue collectively working together to advance our green building movement.
We have made good progress with all these efforts, but there’s still much more that we can do. So I would like to highlight this morning, three broad areas where I think we can continue to make progress.
First, we really have to step up green building efforts as part of the overall global effort to tackle climate change. We all know that global warming will be one of the biggest challenges for humankind. This challenge will be with us for a long time, it’s not just a ten-year effort to tackle global warming, this would be a 50-year or even longer effort to make sure that we keep global warming at bay, and we are successful in our efforts to tackle climate change.
All of you would be aware that the countries around the world have gathered together to sign the Paris Agreement to keep global warming to not more than two degrees. This is a commitment that almost 200 countries have signed to in Paris in December last year, and Singapore has committed to do its part in this Paris Agreement.
In our case, our commitment is to reduce our emissions intensity by 36 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels. If you take reference to 2005, we are going to reduce our emissions intensity by 36 per cent from 2005 to 2030. We are also pledging to stabilise our overall emissions, and to achieve peak emissions by 2030. Not just emissions intensity will be reduced with reference to 2005, but we are going to achieve peak emissions and stabilise overall emissions by 2030. So we are not able to grow more emissions, we are stabilising and 2030 will be the target date.
This is in fact a very ambitious target for Singapore because we have many constraints in achieving this. Unlike many other countries, we do not have a lot of renewable energy alternatives – we say that we are renewable disadvantaged, we do not have geothermal, we have no tidal, we have no wind power, so there are few alternatives we can turn to. We have solar power. That is something we can use, but there again, we are constrained by land, because we don’t have a lot of space in 700 square kilometres of land to deploy big solar farms. Nevertheless, we are looking to set up as many solar panels in our buildings as possible. So we are maximising and pushing the deployment of solar PVs in our buildings.
We are already doing this in a significant way for public sector buildings. So in the public sector, we aggregate demand across different Government agencies and we call bulk tenders for solar PVs. This helps to push the cost down. In fact, in our latest tenders, we have been able to do so in such a way that we don’t even have to pay for the solar PVs. Because the solar installers would come in, and they will install the solar panels and would recover the cost from the electricity that they sell into the grid. It costs the Government nothing to call a tender, and aggregate the demand across different agencies, and get the solar companies to install these solar panels on the rooftops of Government buildings. This is already being done in a big way for public sector buildings, we will continue to push this effort, we certainly hope private sector building owners will do the same, harder in the private sector to aggregate demand, I recognise that. But hopefully through the Green Building Council, through likeminded parties, some of you may wish to do so, aggregating demand, get economies of scale, drive down costs and maximise the deployment of solar panels on your building rooftops.
I think that is one area that we can certainly do more in. But beyond renewable energy and beyond pushing for solar, green buildings are not just about solar, so we really have to go beyond just solar deployment and we have to push harder on efficiency and other greening measures for our buildings, and that is where the green building efforts come in.
If you look at our sources of emissions, buildings are still a major source of greenhouse gas emissions in Singapore. They contribute roughly a quarter of all emissions in Singapore, and there is still scope for us to bring this down.
We have greened about one-third of our buildings in Singapore, and we aim to have 80 per cent of our buildings greened by 2030. This is part of our efforts, in fact, it is an important part of our efforts to achieve the emissions target which I mentioned earlier – to be able to reduce by 36 per cent and achieve stabilisation and peak emissions by 2030. If we slip on the green building target, we will slip on the emissions target as well. Because we don’t have very many other levers to work with, there’s not a lot of other things we can do. So green buildings are really an important part of our overall climate change initiative.
Achieving 80 per cent of green buildings by 2030 is a target that we can do for new buildings. In fact, it is already well underway; new buildings we are able to get them greened, it’s not an issue. I think it will be much more difficult for existing buildings because they need to be retrofitted, and the cost of retrofitting may be sizable for smaller players, for some of our SME building owners.
So we recognise that, and we have come up with schemes to help building owners overcome the cost barrier. BCA has financing scheme, they have a Retrofit Energy Efficiency Financing scheme, where the Government shares part of the risk for loans that building owners take to do energy efficiency retrofits. We also have the Green Mark incentive scheme, which provides grants to offset the cost of retrofits.
So I encourage all private building owners, big or small, to make full use of these incentives programmes. Make full use of the incentives that are out there offered by BCA, think about retrofitting your buildings and helping us achieve this National target together and get 80 per cent of our buildings greened by 2030. That is on the first part, how we can push further on green buildings to achieve our climate change goals.
Secondly,
we should continue to invest in R&D and harness new technologies to advance the green building agenda, and there is a lot that we can do here.
Setting aside climate change targets, our ambition is for all low-rise buildings in Singapore to be positive energy, all medium-rise buildings to be zero energy, and all high-rise buildings to be super-low energy. This is beyond climate change targets and the emissions target. If we can do this, we would have exceeded, so this is the ambition level. It is very hard to do. All low-rise will be positive energy – you are actually selling energy back to the grid, medium-rise zero energy – we don’t draw energy from the grid, and high-rise super-low energy. If we do this for every single building in Singapore, I don’t think we need to build another power plant, and we can save land as well! This is ambition level, it goes beyond 2030 targets, it is extremely hard to do, and it would require R&D, it would require new technologies. How can we achieve this in a cost effective way? There are no easy answers, and I’m sure new technologies will continue to evolve, and so we should make full use of new technologies and tap on them. That’s why for this week’s presentations there will be many sessions on new technologies which you can hear about and listen to, and hopefully, through this exchange, through this discussion, we would be able to advance the technology conversation as well.
One technology that is very promising is the advancement of digital data. You know that with the cost of computing coming down, cost of data is coming down, cost of sensors is coming down. All of this is opening up a new world of big data and data analytics. It’s happening across different industries – in manufacturing, in services, in finance. All of the different industries are making use of big data and data analytics to become more efficient, and this must happen for building management as well. With big data you can track and analyze human traffic, human patterns, usage behaviours. This will allow us to optimise resource consumption – utilisation patterns can be optimised within the building. That is one potential advantage.
We can also start to study and simulate the natural environment, wind patterns, temperature, this will also allow us to do better designs for buildings, making full use of natural conditions, passive design. So that we can design buildings that are cooler, that do not have to require a lot of artificial cooling to bring temperatures down in our case, different for other countries of course, but for us, it’s cooling. With better study of the natural environment, we can have better passive design and also make less use of energy as well. These are many potential benefits of using big data to track human and natural environment.
To facilitate all of this work, BCA will be doing a few things to kick start this big data movement.
Firstly, BCA will be updating the Green Mark scheme for residential buildings to take into account these new technologies and to encourage developers to start adopting some of these technologies and putting in place more sensors into their buildings. Some of these new technologies will be incorporate into these new Green Mark updates.
Secondly, BCA will be expanding the scope of building data collection. Because to do data analytics, you need more data. Today, only owners of commercial, healthcare and educational buildings are required to submit their building information and energy consumption data annually to BCA. From next year onwards, BCA will extend this requirement to cover other building types, such as sports and recreational facilities and civic and community institutions. So that we have a broader range of data that we are able to collect and that we are able to analyze.
Thirdly, the data will not just reside within BCA. BCA will put out the data in an anonymised fashion so that the building information, the energy consumption can all be put out in the public domain. We will do this through the Government’s open data portal – data.gov.sg, as well as in the BCA’s website. So the data will be available, and more people can have access to the data, they can make use of the data to create more apps, more solutions.
Overall, we hope these changes will encourage the industry to come up with new data-driven solutions to green our built environment. This is just one new technology that I’m talking about with digital data, how we can harness more data, put it out, update our standards and encourage more developments in this area. I’m sure that there will be many other new technologies that we can explore, but the overall emphasis here is to make sure that we continue to invest in R&D and harness the potential of new technologies to advance our green building agenda. That’s our second priority.
Thirdly
, and most importantly, a lot of this work that we do, is not just about technology, it is about mindsets, and we have to reach out more, educate the public and that process must start from young.
Technology cannot replace human communities, and buildings are only as green as the people living in them. You can have the most sophisticated technologies and sensors and automation, but if the people living in the buildings have not changed their behaviours, I don’t think you will achieve a green building at the end of the day, and technology cannot overcome many human habits.
At the end of the day we have to do more to raise public awareness on the importance of green buildings, on the benefits of green buildings.
In Singapore, we will be doing this through various fronts, we have the Singapore Green Building Council (SGBC) – they will be working with BCA to reach out to building owners, to building tenants. We have an initiative called “Better Places for People”. Through this initiative we hope to raise awareness – to let people know how green buildings can impact their wealth, their health, their wellbeing and equip them with knowledge on greening their lifestyles and their habits. This is a national awareness and outreach that we will be embarking on.
I know it’s hard to change habits, so it is something that we have to progressively keep pushing. Even in this convention, this particular Green Building Week and the series of activities, we have pushed to set air-con temperatures a little bit higher than normal. The common complaint in Singapore is that you go to most buildings and they are set at such a low temperature and then everyone starts wearing jackets – which is really not necessary in our tropical climate. If you’ve noticed, we have set air-con temperatures a little bit higher at 25 degrees, which is really still very comfortable, you don’t have to set it at 21 degrees, and we have encouraged people to wear office attire without having to put on jackets. There is no reason to set a temperature at 21 degrees and everyone starts to feel cold and bring jackets along to a conference. A small thing like this – it’s something that progressively we have to change mindsets, we have to change habits. It’s hard to do if these habits have been entrenched for many years, sometimes even decades, but we have to work at it and the best way is to start from young. Therefore we have to start engaging our young people.
I am very heartened that for this particular week, we have more than 650 secondary and tertiary students who are participating in events throughout the week. This is the largest group we have ever had since the start of the Green Building Week. We are very encouraged by their participation, because these young people are our future leaders. And I hope they will come and they will get excited about the green building initiative, about what we are doing for climate change, and more institutions will join in in the future so that we can get more young people on board.
Finally, let me conclude by saying that the work we are doing is of upmost importance, and it is crucial in all of our wellbeing – for our wellbeing, for our children’s wellbeing, to ensure the sustainability of humankind. That is the importance of what we are doing. The greener the building, the better and healthier the environment for our people, and ultimately, our ambitions are the only limited to what we can achieve. I encourage all of us here to dream big for the next decade of our green building journey.
Thank you and I wish all of you a very fruitful week ahead.