Introduction
BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) is the longest-established sustainability assessment method for buildings and the scheme most often specified on European projects. Vertical transportation occupies an unusual position within it: unlike most building services, lifts, escalators and moving walks are addressed by a credit written specifically for them. That makes the equipment you specify, and the evidence you can produce for it, directly measurable against the certificate.
Ene 06: the credit written for vertical transportation
In the BREEAM New Construction schemes, Ene 06 Energy efficient transportation systems awards credits for a defined sequence of work rather than for a product claim. The assessor expects three things, in order:
- An analysis of transportation demand and usage patterns for the building: how many units, of what type, and the traffic the building will actually generate.
- A comparison of at least two options for the arrangement, so that the specified system can be shown to be the more energy-efficient of the two.
- At least three energy-efficient features implemented on the specified equipment.
The qualifying features are concrete and verifiable. A regenerative drive returns braking energy to the building supply instead of dissipating it as heat. A standby mode powers down car lighting, fan, door operator and displays while the car is idle. LED car lighting replaces the older fittings that ran continuously. A group or destination control system reduces the number of empty runs. For escalators and moving walks, load-sensing intermittent operation or a variable-speed drive that slows the unit when no passenger is present is the equivalent measure.
Note the order. The analysis comes first. A project that installs efficient equipment without documenting the demand study will usually fail to earn the credit, because the credit rewards the engineering decision rather than the datasheet.
Ene 01 and Ene 02: where lifts appear indirectly
Ene 01, reduction of energy use and carbon emissions, counts the building’s modelled energy performance, and vertical transportation forms part of that model. Ene 02, energy monitoring, asks for sub-metering of the major energy-consuming systems. Lifts and escalators are routinely among them, so a dedicated meter on the lift supply, reporting into the building management system rather than to a local display, is the practical requirement. Specifying that meter at tender stage costs very little. Retrofitting it after handover is disruptive and expensive.
ISO 25745: turning claims into evidence
The question an assessor asks is not whether the equipment is efficient, but how you know. ISO 25745 is the answer. Part 2 covers lifts and Part 3 covers escalators and moving walks; both produce an energy classification from A to G, together with the usage category that the classification assumes.
The usage category matters more than most specifiers expect. ISO 25745 separates travel energy from standby energy, and in a low-traffic building, a residential block or a small office, the car spends the overwhelming majority of the year idle. In that profile standby consumption can exceed the energy used for travel. A highly efficient machine paired with a car that never powers down can therefore measure worse than a modest machine with a proper sleep mode. Asking the manufacturer for the classification and for the usage category behind it is the difference between a number and a fact.
Health and Wellbeing, Materials and Management
Outside the energy categories, three areas recur. Under Health and Wellbeing, car finishes with low volatile organic compound emissions and attention to machine and door noise affect occupant comfort, while car dimensions, signalling and controls to EN 81-70 support inclusive-design requirements. Under Materials, environmental product declarations for the equipment feed the life-cycle assessment of the building’s products, and responsible sourcing of steel and finishes is assessed separately. Under Management, a system that is straightforward to maintain, that has documented spare-part availability and that reports its own energy use remotely supports the commissioning and handover credits.
Existing buildings: modernisation
New construction is not the only route. BREEAM also assesses refurbishment and fit-out work, and vertical transportation is one of the strongest candidates in an existing building. A drive and controller from the 1990s dissipates braking energy as heat, runs car lighting continuously and cannot report its own consumption.
replacing the drive, controller and car lighting while retaining the guide rails, car frame and doors delivers a large proportion of the available saving for a fraction of a full replacement. The Ene 06 logic still applies: measure the demand first, compare the options, then specify. The existing shaft constrains what is possible, which makes the survey more important rather than less. Our modernisation work is organised around exactly that sequence.
How Bronze Lift supports a BREEAM submission
Bronze Lift works as the engineering side of the supply. We size the installation against the building’s actual traffic, prepare the option comparison that Ene 06 expects, and collect the documents the assessor will ask for: the ISO 25745 classification with its usage category, environmental product declarations, EN 81-70 compliance statements and the sub-metering specification. Because every project is configured rather than taken from a shelf, the specification can be tuned to the credits the project is genuinely targeting instead of over-specifying equipment that earns nothing.
Conclusion
Vertical transportation is one of the few building services with a BREEAM credit of its own, and it is won on documentation as much as on hardware: a demand analysis, a comparison of options, three verifiable features and a classification you can evidence. Send us the drawings and the expected traffic and we will return a specification with the supporting documents already assembled.