Scotland's non-domestic energy efficiency baseline: report

This document outlines the energy efficiency of Scotland's non-domestic buildings with projections based on energy performance certificate data.


Current EPC ratings

The mean building emissions rate across Scottish non-domestic premises is estimated to be 111 kg of CO2 emissions per square metre per year. A building with this modelled emissions intensity would fall into band G, the poorest performance band including all premises with modelled emissions exceeding 100 kgCO2/m2/yr. A building with median (midpoint of numerically ordered values) modelled emissions would lie within band F, equivalent to between 81 and 100 kgCO2/m2/yr. This difference between the mean and median reflects the mean being skewed by buildings with extremely high ratings, some in excess of 1000 kgCO2/m2/yr.

In line with the bandings above, education has the lowest mean emissions intensity at 67 kgCO2/m2/yr and storage and distribution has a similar mean rating. The mean rating for these properties falls in the middle of band E.

The hotel and restaurant, café and takeaway categories perform particularly poorly with mean ratings of 179 kgCO2/m2/yr and 177 kgCO2/m2/yr respectively.

The current EPC rating approach is more useful as an indicator of overall emissions than as an indicator of how a building performs compared to other buildings of a different building type. This is discussed further in the next section.

Figure 5: Mean current EPC rating

Figure 5: Mean current EPC rating

Contact

Email: Mark Nightingale

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