Smart and Sustainable Buildings in 2025: Key Drivers for a Greener Future

Written by Yeo Choon Chong, Chief Executive, Integrated Solutions and Tsubasa Bolt, Senior Environmental Design Consultant, Sustainability and Resilience Office for The Edge magazine

As we approach 2025, the built environment in Singapore is poised for significant transformation. The facilities management sector is under pressure to adapt to evolving regulatory demands, cost pressures, and technological advancements. Three key drivers will shape the future of FM and enhance its sustainability: the mandatory energy improvement regime, the impact of rising temperatures on energy costs, and the growing trend towards adaptive reuse in construction.

Climate disclosures, tighter regulations: A Catalyst for Energy Efficiency

The Mandatory Energy Improvement regime, set to kick in from Q3 2025, will require existing energy-intensive buildings to undergo energy audits and implement energy efficiency improvement measures. This mandate applies to commercial, healthcare, institutional, civic, community, and educational buildings with a gross floor area exceeding 5,000m². Buildings are required to reduce their Energy Usage Intensity by 10 percent from pre-energy audit levels – an achievable target by implementing the right strategies.

Asset owners are encouraged to take a medium to long term view on capital expenditure- heavy investments in energy efficient systems. The energy audits will generate energy consumption patterns and identify performance gaps, and guide asset owners on a strategy to prolong the lifespan of assets, reducing operating costs in the long run, and contribute to a more sustainable built environment. Building owners can leverage grants to help cover the costs of energy efficiency upgrades.

Temasek Polytechnic is Singapore’s first smart campus. It embarked on a bold ambition to digitize its campus operations in 2021. Temasek Polytechnic’s experience offers valuable insights into the future of smart and sustainable facilities management.

At the heart of Temasek Polytechnic’s smart campus is a suite of solutions that digitize campus operations including facility booking, automate campus repair and maintenance work orders, crowd management and temperature control measures. These systems are aggregated into a common data environment that generates data, visualized, tracked and monitored at a control centre on campus to help campus operations teams decide on a strategy that keeps the building operational systems healthy for as long as possible to maximise the return on investment in these assets, and reduce operational carbon levels.

Temasek Polytechnic’s experience offers a model for smart and sustainable facilities management. By embracing digitalization, data analytics, and sustainable practices, the sector can drive sustainability, reduce costs, and ensure long-term operational success.

Another push is set to come from climate disclosure obligations for all listed companies and large non-listed companies, with revenues of at least S$1 billion and total assets of least S$500m from 2027.

Rising Temperatures and Energy Costs will nudge investments in proptech 

Rising temperatures predicted for 2025 will exacerbate cooling demands in buildings, prompting more investments in predictive technology. Air Conditioning and Mechanical Ventilation (ACMV) systems are already a major contributor to operational costs, accounting for approximately 60% of total energy expenses in many buildings.

Optimizing energy systems is crucial to mitigate rising energy costs. Building owners can achieve this by implementing energy-efficient solutions such as energy-recovery systems or thermal energy storage. Additionally, optimizing chiller plant operations to match changing weather conditions reduces energy waste and costs.

At a city and precinct level, extreme weather risks such as flooding and urban heat threaten the health and performance of critical infrastructure including drainage and plumbing systems, critical infrastructure that keep precincts running smoothly. As such, having a clearer idea of climate change risks is steadily being incorporated into building operations. Singapore has witnessed several flash flood incidents which have caused considerable damage to properties. To mitigate these risks, building owners and city planners have the opportunity to leverage advances in web-based geospatial IT to help facilities and asset managers identify flood-prone areas or extreme heat-exposed spaces, to drive a comprehensive operational plan that considers predicting extreme weather events to mitigate the risk of equipment failure and downtime, optimizing chiller plant operations to match changing weather conditions.

The increasing cost of construction is prompting a shift towards adaptive reuse, with the rate of redevelopment in Singapore accelerating over the past five years. Already, SJ estimates that mechanical and electrical costs have increased by approximately 30 percent, compared to pre-covid. The rise in construction costs can be attributed to an increase in logistic shipping costs by 77 per cent; labour costs by approximately nine per cent; price rises in construction material such as copper, by about 15 per cent, and the shortage of M&E contractors. This trend is driving the adoption of smart design and engineering practices, utilizing collaborative common data environments to benchmark construction and operational costs.

Adaptive Reuse as a response to rising costs

Platforms that support Integrated Digital Delivery are enabling real estate developers and contractors to gain real-time insights into key performance indicators such as time, cost, quality, and safety. Proptech platforms such as Podium, aim to provide a digital ecosystem that connects developers, designers and the supply chain in order to deliver high construction productivity and promote sustainable building practices. By consolidating data from multiple sources, all stakeholders across the various stages of the building cycle – from design, to construction to delivery and operations – will be able to access valuable data on design, civil and structural engineering plans, construction materials and  components at the delivery stage to drive deliberate goals to minimise embodied carbon levels. Data on structural frames, superstructures and foundations are critical when building owners have to decide whether to redevelop or re-use it, in other words, apply an adaptive re-use approach. Increasingly, retaining structural walls colmuns, beams and slabs can lead to material, time and labour savings.

Post-construction, Podium can integrate with other operational platforms to track building performance metrics including energy, waste, water, indoor air quality, occupancy trends – to drive operational carbon reduction goals. The utility cost of (ACMV) chiller plants very quickly spiral post-construction when buildings start operations, to make up the bulk of the energy tariffs, at about 60 per cent of total operational expenditure.

Smart buildings mitigate further cost pressures by maximising the life cycle of capex-heavy equipment including ACMV, lifts, air handling units through a data-driven long-term Life Cycle approach that prioritize energy savings to offset these energy tariffs from the capital expenditure incurred from investing in the equipment. The investment in smart building infrastructure informs procurement, replacement and retrofit programmes that optimises the efficiencies of the equipment, maximise return on investment and importantly assist the building owner to comply with local and international regulations and sustainable financing requirements.

This is possible because sensors are able to monitor and track the performance of each component in a piece of equipment. Implementing predictive maintenance for Air-conditioning and Mechanical Ventilation (ACMV) equipment helps in reducing downtime and improve equipment efficiency. For example, sensors can be deployed to analyze the vibration in the chiller equipment which helps to reveal wear or impending failure on the rotating equipment. Similarly, thermographic testing with heat-sensing scanners and imaging equipment can be used to detect abnormal temperatures or heat built up in the system. AI-powered smart monitoring systems can be deployed to monitor various components of a building’s Mechanial and Electrical system using sensors, providing granular detail on the performance of each of the components to help asset owners make informed decisions around parts that need to be replaced within a specific period, based on the type of defects and the regularity of the breakdowns. With access to detailed data,  building owners are able to identify various options; to retrofit, to replace entire systems, which can be prohibitive.