theceomagazine.com | 137“Synergy partnership with Comfort Management has
been a great achievement. The objective oriented with
proper process flow demonstrated has set a whole new
level in Energy Savings. Collaborative synchronisation plays
a vital role in ensuring highest work quality to exceed our
stretch goals towards Green sustainability.” – Total Solutions
M&E Sdn. Bhd.push. By doing so, we are encouraging more building
owners to be energy efficient when they might otherwise
be preoccupied with things other than sustainability.
“So then what we do is structure the EPC to encourage
them to take an active step towards sustainability. With the
EPC, we are trying to minimise the risk for building
owners. For example, the risk of investing a sum of money
to retrofit the system without realising the savings. However,
we guarantee that after you retrofit everything, you will
get savings, and the savings will repay the investment over
a period of time.”
EPCs have become a huge success. “Later on, the
government came up with financial incentives to encourage
buildings to retrofit their systems,” Fatt Seng adds. “So we
also used that to tie-in and accelerate the payback for
building owners and expand in the market.”
In a similar vein, Fatt Seng pioneered the Green
Maintenance Program. “There is a conventional idea that
if you retrofit a system, its efficiency will decline as it gets
older,” he says. “But to us, from an engineering perspective,
we believe that whatever equipment you’ve invested in,
if you maintain it well, you will preserve its efficiency
throughout its lifespan. Whether it’s 15 or 25 years.
“Because you focus on the performance, meaning the
system can deal with the cooling capacity while at the same
time controlling its energy input, you maintain efficiency
throughout the whole building. That is green maintenance.”
Fatt Seng says it’s different from normal maintenance
where contractors just do what they have to do and walk
away without knowing whether the system is going to
be efficient or not. “We encourage business owners by
explaining that after investing so much money, they can
protect their investment by having green maintenance,”
Comfort Management’s work on the
52-storey AXA Tower in Singapore
reduced the building’s energy bills
by around S$491,000 per annum
without needing to change its chillers.he says. “It means having more work done
to ensure that the investment continues to
perform at the same efficiency as when it
was new.”
Comfort Management’s managing director
is also heavily involved in promoting
environmental sustainability throughout
Singapore. He is on the board of the
Singapore Green Building Council (SGBC)
and co-chairs a group together with the
government’s Building and Construction
Authority to grant accreditation to energy
performance contractors. “There are about
14 accredited energy performance
contractors,” Fatt Seng says.
“We also realised that after you retrofit
the whole system, you will need facility
management companies to embrace
sustainability in their practises. So we also
developed an accreditation of green facility
management companies. Now we want to
work on accreditation of air-conditioning
companies that maintain these buildings.”
Fatt Seng acknowledges that despite
the business operating for 26 years, there
is still much to be done when it comes to
environmental sustainability. “In Singapore,
the government has a plan to make 80 per
cent of the country’s buildings green by
2030,” he says. “As of now, it has achieved
about 34 per cent. So, we still have a long
journey ahead over the next 12 years.”Interview | INVEST