Energy management ranked higher in Indian real estate: Jennifer Layke

Track2Realty: Jennifer Layke is the Director of Johnson Controls’ Institute for Building Efficiency, a global initiative to provide information and analysis of technologies, policies, and practices in high performance buildings and smart energy systems from a practitioner’s perspective. She leads the Institute’s research agenda and collaborations with a network of global experts on topical areas including commercial building efficiency, smart buildings & the smart grid, green building design, and renewable energy technologies.

She has been recently in India to release the third annual global Energy Efficiency Survey, which shows strong interest in energy management among India’s building owners. In an exclusive interview with Track2Realty, she says willingness of real estate to adopt best practices in Green Building and Energy Efficient Building makes her optimistic in India. Excerpts:

Track2Realty: What are the key findings of your study in India?

Jennifer Layke: In India, there were a couple of things. First of all, energy management is ranked higher than in any other country. There is also an expectation of price increase for this, more significant price increases than we saw anywhere else in the world, about 18% in 2011. The rest of the world was at a global average of 11%. So there are some significant differences in terms of what is driving the market.

The second thing we found this year is that Indian respondents indicated energy efficiency and energy security is their number two driver. North America ranked it much lower as to why an organization would pursue energy efficiency. So there is a concern and we did not ask whether this was for the security of supply, reliability, power quality. We did not ask those kind of questions but we did ask if that was their driver for pursuing energy efficiency and indeed it was.

Track2Realty: Any other significant trend that you notice in India?

Jennifer Layke: The other thing I would say is a global trend is the green buildings. We see in every major market that green buildings are increasingly sought after. Even if the organizations are not pursuing certification, they are incorporating green elements into their buildings. In India, we found that 53% of respondents said that they were planning to pursue green building certification in either the existing or new buildings in the next 12 months.

……to be continued