Green building law: Owners who do not register face jail time or fine

Nonresidential building owners risk five years’ imprisonment or a fine of R5 million if they do not register for an energy performance certificate.

The South African National Energy Development Institute (Sanedi) under the directive of the department of mineral resources and energy (DMRE), has set a deadline of the end of next year for nonresidential buildings to register on the National Building Energy Performance Register to embark on the process to obtaining a mandatory energy performance certificates (EPC) at the entrance of their buildings.

Sanedi was established to conduct energy research and development to promote energy efficiency within the green economy.

The National Energy Act stipulates that certain nonresidential buildings need to focus on how they use energy efficiently, or risk jail time of up to five years or paying a fine of R5 million.

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This is according to regulations gazetted by Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe in 2020, which require buildings to obtain energy performance certificates and make it mandatory to display them.

The EPC lead at Sanedi, Nqobile Ngcobo, said that applied to publicly owned buildings of a 1 000m2 size and privately owned buildings of 2 000m2.

Ngcobo said up until the end of 2022, the uptake was quite low and because of this, the department had extended the deadline until December 2025.

Ngcobo said: “There are just over 4 000 buildings that are registered and almost 2 900 buildings that have EPCs, with the Gauteng province leading.”

She however could not say how many were outstanding. “Come December 2025 buildings who have not complied with the regulation will obviously be made an example of,” Ngcobo said.

Salga ensures compliance

The South African Local Government Association (Salga) has been hard at work with ensuring that the public sector buildings are in compliance.

Dr Silas Mulaudzi, a specialist in sustainable energy at Salga said: “We have been hosting awareness campaigns for years, engaging municipalities across the country to ensure compliance.

He added: “We have explained how to register on the Sanedi online portal.” He said they had one more meeting with municipalities before the looming 1 August deadline of registering buildings for EPCs.

Sanedi said because of the slowpaced registrations from 2022, there was an amendment in the Act that pushed building owners to at least register on the website, even if they had not begun the process of the EPC assessment.

“It helps government as well to track those buildings that are registered to say, we’ve seen you registered, where’s the EPC?” Ngcobo said.

The amendment also changed the definition of an energy performance certificate, Ngcobo said.

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“At its initial stage, an energy performance certificate was issued by an accredited body. And then, it gave powers to the South African National Accreditation System to accredit these inspection bodies so that they can issue EPCs and now they introduced what we call registered professionals.

“Meaning the industry bodies will be phased out from 1 August and the registered professionals will be issuing these certificates”.

Uncertainties have been raised as the amendments were only promulgated much later. Ngcobo said:

“Some entities had long-standing contracts of two or three years, so now the problem is that from 1 August what will happen to those existing contracts with the industry bodies because now it means those accredited bodies cannot legally issue EPC’s any more.”

She added that the DMRE was open to having businesses write to ask for grace periods in this regard so they can include their legal departments. However, she said the regulation would not change despite this