What’s happened?
The Building Energy Efficiency Disclosure Act (Cth) (BEED Act) will come into operation from 1 November 2010.
Who needs to know?
Owners, lessors, buyers and lessees of commercial buildings.
The BEED Act imposes disclosure obligations on a company which owns a ‘disclosure affected building’.
What do they need to do?
A company cannot offer to sell or offer to lease a ‘disclosure affected building’ unless ‘a valid, current building energy efficiency certificate for the building is registered’.
Proposed purchasers and lessees of ‘disclosure affected buildings’ are given reciprocal rights to require such a certificate from their vendors and lessors.
What is a ‘disclosure affected building’?
A ‘disclosure affected building’ is a building which is:
- ‘used or capable of being used as an office’, and
- of a kind specified by the Minister from time to time under the BEED Act.
No specifications have yet been made, however it appears that the scheme will apply initially only to office buildings with a nett lettable area of 2,000m or more.
What is involved in giving a ‘building energy efficiency certificate’?
The disclosure obligations in the BEED Act involve registering and giving a ‘building energy efficiency certificate’ (BEEC) containing ‘building energy efficiency ratings’ (BEERs).
The BEER for a building is its energy efficiency rating as specified in a BEEC for the building.
A BEEC is a certificate which sets out the energy efficiency rating for a building, an assessment of the energy efficiency of the lighting for the building that might reasonably be expected to remain if the building is sold, let or sublet, and guidance on how energy efficiency might be improved.
The BEED Act provides for ‘legislative instruments’ to be made which set out the relevant rating and assessment methods for these purposes. No such legislative instruments have yet been made.
A BEEC is issued on application to an issuing authority established under the BEED Act. Under the Act, accredited assessors have wide powers to gather information on a building, as do auditing authorities to audit that information.
Public availability of information
The BEED Act provides for the establishment and maintenance of:
- a publicly available electronic register of certificates, past and present, known as the Building Energy Efficiency Register, and
- a publicly available electronic register of ‘instances of non-disclosure’, known as the Energy Efficiency Non-disclosure Register.
Enforcement
The BEED Act designates many of its provisions as ‘civil penalty provisions’. They can be enforced by (and only by) the Secretary of the Federal Department of Energy Efficiency in judicial proceedings in Federal Courts within a six-year limitation period or by ‘infringement notice’ within a one-year limitation period.
This article was written by John Taberner, Consultant, Peter Briggs, Partner, Sydney and Michael Voros, Senior Associate, Perth.
More information
For information regarding possible implications for your business, contact