Q: How do I finance a sustainable building in a time of inflation?
We are currently going through a time of economic concern in construction projects because of inflation. In Colombia, we are finding that materials like steel, PVC, aluminum and copper have been subject to increases of around 80% since December 2020. This situation means that your building budget may be different from what you projected.
For some builders, that leads to cutting costs on things that are perceived as added value to their projects, like sustainability features and green certification, but the good news is that there are better ways to work on a budget. Here are some tips for speaking to your client about their options, learning ways to cut costs during the design and construction process, strategic planning, and marketing, so you can show the benefits to your budget-conscious counterpart.
1. Identify the most sustainable way to invest available resources.
You have a certain amount of resources at the moment, and now they tell you that they may not be enough. How can you create more with less? Sometimes we forget the importance of sitting down and going over the basics of our building and how it consumes energy or water:
Energy
Create an energy consumption pie chart for your base building that gives you an idea of where most of the energy is going to be consumed. Attacking that area will bring the best outcome. You should also take into account the proportion of the overall cost invested in sustainability, so you can decide using both variables. A useful formula for that would be:
% of energy consumption x % sustainability cost = cost-benefit index
This number should have a tendency toward zero, and the closer it is to it, the better the investment you are making. You can rank each measure and compare that to your available budget to find the investments you can and should make.
If you want to use a renewable energy analysis, the formula would be really similar, but this time with the projected savings on energy coming from the system and the percentage of sustainability cost, multiplied in the same way, so the rest of the analyses should be the same.