Speech by Minister Desmond Lee at Opening Ceremony for Keppel Infrastructure @ Changi

Thursday, 13 October 2022

Mr Loh Chin Hua, CEO, Keppel Corporation
Ms Cindy Lim, CEO, Keppel Infrastructure
Colleagues
Industry partners
Ladies and Gentlemen

1. A very good afternoon to everyone. I am really delighted to join you at the opening ceremony of Keppel Infrastructure right here at Changi.

2. Today marks a significant milestone in our push towards a low-carbon built environment, and indeed a low-carbon city and a low-carbon future.

3. Keppel Infrastructure @ Changi is the first building here in Singapore to achieve the Green Mark Platinum Positive Energy certification under the latest edition of the Green Mark scheme. What this means is that your building generates at least 15% more energy than you consume from renewable sources on site. It is also an existing building – not a new building – that has been retrofitted to achieve the highest tier of Green Mark standards.

4. I would like to congratulate Keppel and all your partners on this very significant accomplishment. This spirit of pushing boundaries is crucial in our collective efforts to address climate change.

Greening buildings to support our net zero ambition

5. We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change today; our weather in Singapore, and what is happening across the world. In fact this year we have seen devasting floods across Asia, extreme droughts and heatwaves in the United States, Europe and China, and many other places.

6. Closer to home, temperatures in Singapore reached a record 36.8 degrees Celsius on 1 April this year – the second-highest temperature ever recorded on our island. These severe weather events reinforce the need for us to act quickly and decisively.

7. To limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, all countries must work together to drastically cut global emissions and reach net zero by around 2050.

8. Although we are a small city, Singapore is doing our part. Last year, we launched the Singapore Green Plan 2030, which is a whole-of-nation – not just government – movement to pursue sustainable development. And we announced in February this year that we will be raising our climate ambition to achieve net zero carbon emissions by or around mid-century.

9. Our buildings contribute over one-fifth or 20% of Singapore’s emissions, so this is not insignificant. Greening our buildings is therefore crucial to achieve our net zero aspirations.

10. As the private sector, you play an important part in this endeavour. For example, Keppel has set ambitious targets by committing to halve your carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050. And as we see today, Keppel is also taking concrete action to achieve these targets by decarbonising its operations.

11. The Government will continue to work closely with our partners to achieve a more sustainable Built Environment.

12. Together with the industry and community, we launched the latest edition of the Singapore Green Building Masterplan last year. We have set three ambitious targets, which we call “80-80-80 in 2030”.

13. The first 80, commits us to green 80% of our buildings by Gross Floor Area (GFA); this means meeting the raised baseline environmental targets that we set. We are making good progress and have greened more than half our buildings by GFA today. But we will need to sustain our momentum and push ahead, and the remainder is challenging because we are talking about existing buildings, older buildings of quite some vintage.

14. We recognise that retrofitting an existing building or old buildings for better energy performance can be more challenging, and can be a lot more costly than designing a new green building right from scratch. This is why we launched an incentive scheme in June to co-fund retrofitting works to improve a building’s energy efficiency. We hope that building owners will take this opportunity to green their buildings, especially older buildings which can be less energy efficient. In fact today is just one fine example of how it can be done, par excellence. So that is the first 80: to meet heightened baseline environmental standards, and green 80% by GFA by the end of this decade.

15. The second 80, what is it? We aim for 80% of new developments to be Super Low Energy (SLE) buildings from 2030 onwards. So we have some time to build up, but from 2030 onwards, 80% of new buildings must be SLE. These are buildings that achieve energy savings of over 60% as compared to when we first started the green buildings journey in 2005.

16. The Government will have to take the lead to spur SLE standards by raising the energy performance requirements for public sector buildings. But we will also need your help in the private sector help to make SLE developments the mainstream. We encourage developers to tap on the Built Environment Transformation GFA Incentive Scheme, which awards new developments on non-Government Land Sales (GLS) sites with bonus GFA, if you meet Green Mark Platinum SLE standards, among other requirements. It is an incentive to help you. That is the second 80.

17. The third 80 is this: we aim for our best-in-class green buildings to achieve an 80% improvement in energy efficiency over the 2005 baseline. So instead of 60%, we have pushed it to 80% for best-in-class. So far, we have reached 65% to 70% improvement and we obviously have some way to go. So we encourage building owners, developers and your partners all along the value chain to work with our research institutions, to develop and demonstrate green building technologies through our Green Buildings Innovation Cluster (GBIC) Programme 2.0.

Keppel Infrastructure @ Changi

18. Through the use of innovative solutions, Keppel Infrastructure @ Changi has shown how businesses can bring us closer to our “80-80-80 in 2030” targets, as well as support our City in Nature aspiration.

19. This building demonstrates three key strategies to achieve positive energy standards.

20. First, you have adopted energy-efficient and sustainable design.

21. Keppel has tapped on NParks’ Skyrise Greenery Incentive Scheme to integrate nature right into the building. Your vertical greenery and sky gardens add up to over 900 square metres – about three quarters the size of an Olympic swimming pool. This biophilic design not only cools the building using nature, and reduces its energy consumption, but can also improve the wellbeing of users.

22. Second, you have maximised the production of clean energy. If you look closely, you will see that the building’s façade is actually made of many small solar panels, and this demonstrates that. This building-integrated photovoltaic system maximises the amount of renewable energy generated by using vertical solar panels to capture sunlight. Technology has improved and we hope it will continue improve in leaps and bound. Some years back, people told us vertical solar panels are not cost-efficient and unable to generate good outcomes, but things improve quickly. It can be used in both new buildings and retrofitted ones like Keppel Infrastructure @ Changi.

23. Together with your rooftop solar panels, the building can generate over 600,000 kilowatt hours of renewable energy per year, which offsets more than 200% of your energy consumption – equivalent to the amount of carbon sequestering by planting more than 7,000 new trees.

24. Third, employing smart Facilities Management (FM) technologies, optimising the utility and functioning of your building.

25. Smart sensors allow facilities managers to collect and monitor key information such as room occupancy and usage. Your Computerised Maintenance Management System leverages this data to adjust lighting automatically, balancing between ensuring energy efficiency and the ambient comfort of your users.

26. The data you have collected can also be utilised and mined to enable predictive maintenance. This allows potential failures such as fan failures to be detected and dealt with pre-emptively even before they occur.

27. So I appreciate and applaud the efforts that you have taken here at Keppel to work towards a much more sustainable future, and I look forward to more organisations joining us on our journey towards being a net zero sovereign city state.

Conclusion

28. Let me conclude.

29. The climate crisis demands collective action, and we need to act now. Everyone – government, corporates, individuals – must work together to reduce our carbon emissions, and push Singapore towards net-zero.

30. Together, Singapore and the rest of the world, we should shape a greener and more sustainable future, not just for ourselves but for generations to come.

31. Thank you, and congratulations once again!