Australians appointed to develop energy efficiency in Dubai cities

An Australian technology services company, EP&T Global, has been appointed to assist in driving down energy consumption in three new iconic city precincts in Dubai known as Media City, Knowledge City and Internet City.

The company, EP&T Global, is headquartered in Sydney’s Chatswood and has an Advisory Board chaired by former Sydney 2000 Olympic Games chief executive Sandy Hollway and includes the former National President of the Property Council of Australia, John McCarthy. The company is steering its global push, initially into the UK and now to the Gulf States.

“The Dubai contract is potentially very, very significant indeed,” said Sandy Hollway. “It is breaking into a very lucrative market in the Gulf region and, despite the global financial crisis, this is an area which is structurally wealthy because of its natural resources.”

The win follows the recent release of the 2011 Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark Report which surveyed 21,000 buildings and found five of the world’s top 10 property funds were utilising EP&T’s energy optimisation technologies.

Of the Dubai contract, EP&T’s founder and chief executive, Keith Gunaratne, who brokered the Dubai contract with property management company Tecom Investments, said: “Why Dubai? It’s a country with huge energy intensity.

“It's a region that has been marked by the United Nations as having the [world’s] second-highest carbon footprint. The temperatures are so high and therefore the opportunities for savings are huge.”

The contract will also put EP&T’s technology in front of some of the biggest companies in the world which are tenants in the precincts, including BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, IBM, Microsoft, Mastercard, Dell, HP and Oxford University.

Through the use of EP&T’s ‘Edge’ technology and services, Tecom Investments is targeting energy savings of 15% per annum in precinct buildings.

Hollway, a former Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Industry, Science and Technology and former Board member of Austrade and CSIRO, said it has been a passion of his to showcase Australian cleverness and excellence.

“This is a business with very smart proprietary technology which really is the best in the world [as] we can see from the fact that a big property developer like British Land in the UK decided in 2009 to start using this technology.”

The company currently works for 57% of the Premium and A-grade building owners across Australia, with major clients including Stockland, GPT group & Charter Hall. Iconic buildings using its technology to reduce energy consumption include Darling Park and Number 1 Martin Place in Sydney and the Commonwealth Bank Building at 385 Bourke Street in Melbourne.