Public sustainable-energy requirements and innovation in UK PFI school projects

Abstract

In a bid to understand the relationship between public sector clients’ sustainable energy requirements and innovation, this paper describes a study examining the requirement development process in four private finance initiative (PFI) school projects. A case study approach was adopted to enable a greater understanding of the public sector clients’ activities at the front end of the design process, particularly focusing on requirement identification and the effect of the requirement on private sector actors’ pursuit of an innovative sustainable design. The findings have shown that incentive effects of the requirements are often weak in PFI projects, particularly in relation to the requirement’s specificity and achievability, the inability of requirements such as BREEAM to promote energy efficiency and the low weighting of environmental sustainability on PFI bid evaluation criteria. Taken together, these results offer insight into public authorities in relation to the necessary conditions for the use of requirements as an effective contractual mechanism to encourage innovation for sustainable energy.