NABERS

NABERS (National Australian Built Environment Rating System) is a building benchmark system that rates environmental impact for Australia’s built environment, such as offices, shopping centers, hotels and more. Similar to the efficiency star ratings for household appliances, NABERS provides a rating from one to six stars to assess buildings' efficiency across energy, water, waster, and indoor environment. Use the IBM® Envizi ESG Suite Building Ratings and Benchmarks module to track your NABERS office energy and office water ratings.

NABERS provides accredited ratings once per year that are measured in stars. You can use the Envizi ESG Suite NABERS dashboards to capture the accredited ratings and associated documents. However, you can also use the NABERS dashboards to view indicative ratings on an ongoing basis, with the advantage of being able to view the ratings expressed in a more granular decimal format as well as in star format. Therefore, on an ongoing basis ,you can analyze how your buildings and locations are tracking against your rating targets and make adjustments early on.

The Envizi ESG Suite Building Ratings and Benchmarks module includes the following functionality for NABERS office energy and office water ratings:

Capture all accredited NABERS rating information and auditing documentations in a centralized place, normally for a portfolio of buildings and locations.
View and calculate indicative NABERS office energy and water ratings by using the New South Wales (NSW) Treasury's Office of Energy and Climate Change official NABERS rating algorithms. Envizi ESG Suite is a NABERS Equipped software service provider and has obtained a license from the NSW Office of Energy and Climate Change to use the algorithm in the Envizi ESG Suite platform.
Track and monitor the trend of NABERS office indicative ratings month by month, and compare with the latest accredited rating.
Review consumption trends month-by-month and consumption intensity by rated area.
Store and review NABERS related consumption and building data in a centralized place for easy access by NABERS assessors.
Review and report NABERS portfolio average accredited ratings.

Viewing current indicative NABERS rating and associated attributes

NABERS ratings normally apply to buildings or a locations. Four dashboards are available for different NABERS rating types, which include office water, and office energy for base building, whole building, and tenancy. In the dashboards, you can view the current indicative NABERS rating, and also the latest accredited rating of a location, its rating period, and expiry date. You can also see the trend of the indicative ratings over the previous 24 months, and compare them with the accredited ratings.

Access the NABERS dashboards and reports through the Location pages. To display a NABERS dashboard, in a Location Summary page, click Benchmarks.

In each NABERS dashboard, you can view a grid of indicative rating details such as rated electricity in kWh, natural gas in MJ and rated area in m2. The grid shows rolling 12 months of data for the previous 24 months. Each record represents 12 month of data that are used to calculate the indicative rating for the month of the rating end period.

You can also view a utility consumption and intensity bar chart that shows the previous year's consumption, so that you can compare the current year's performance with the previous year's performance.

Viewing the average NABERS portfolio rating for base building and water ratings

The average NABERS base building and water rating for a portfolio can be viewed from the NABERS portfolio dashboard. It can be accessed through the Group > Benchmark > NABERS Office Building Portfolio - Accredited menu. The dashboard shows the weighted average rating for office energy and water.

Alternatively, to see the average rating for the whole organization, click Monitor > NABERS Office Building Portfolio - Accredited to display all locations with NABERS accredited ratings captured in the organization.

By default, a location's base building rating is used to calculated the average but if it is not available for a location, the location's whole building rating is used if it is available. The calculation of the average rating follows the portfolio average ruling published by NABERS, which means the average rating is area-weighted. The calculation also takes building ownership into consideration, which is captured as a Location-Group membership percentage in Envizi ESG Suite.

Fore more information about configuring NABERS, see the Configuring NABERS topic in this section.

Capturing accredited NABERS rating results and related certification documents

To use the NABERS dashboards most effectively, especially the NABERS portfolio dashboard, you must capture accredited NABERS rating information. The following steps show how to create and capture ratings for a location:

Go to the location's Summary page and click Benchmark > Location Ratings.
To capture a new rating, click Create New.
Choose the correct rating body from the following list:
- NABERS Office-Base Energy Ex GP
- NABERS Office-Tenancy Energy Ex GP
- NABERS Office-Water Whole Building
- NABERS Office-Whole Energy Ex GP
You can capture location ratings for other related NABERS rating bodies that are not included in the previous list by uploading attachments for the ratings, but the ratings are not reflected in NABERS dashboards.
Complete the remaining compulsory fields and then click Save.
Add any related documents to the location rating as Attachments through the preview panel.

For buildings that have both Excluding Green Power rating and Including Green Power ratings, both ratings should be captured. For more details about capturing accredited ratings, see the Configuring NABERS topic.