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Editorial advisory panel Laurence Aston, Director, Buro Happold
David Clark, Partner, Max Fordham Consulting Engineers
Patrick Conaghan, Partner, Hoare Lea Consulting Engineers
David Hughes, Building Services Consultant, MTT Consulting Philip King, Director, Hilson Moran
Chani Leahong, Senior Associate, Fulcrum Consulting
Alan Tulla, President, The Society of Light and Lighting
Professor John Swaffield, CIBSE Past President
Ged Tyrrell, Managing Director, Tyrrell Systems Ant Wilson, Director, AECOM Morwenna Wilson, Graduate Engineer, Arup Terry Wyatt, Consultant to Hoare Lea
Christopher Pountney, Graduate Engineer, AECOM
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From the editor
Learning curves – and blind alleys I
f you believe the rhetoric of the coalition government – which of course is simply repeating the mantra of its Labour predecessor – the green-technology industry
ABC audited circulation: 19,728 January to December 2009
has the potential to provide major sources of new jobs and wealth in Britain. That claim, like much of the technology that is presented as the best thing since sliced bread, is so much hot air. There is no sign yet that ‘cleantech’, whether in the automotive, energy or indeed building services sectors, will grow so dramatically in just a matter of years. The simple reason for this is that such technologies need a lot of investment to emerge, and when they do so, they take a considerable amount of time to establish themselves in the marketplace as both effective and affordable green solutions. In the building services engineering sector this is very apparent when it comes to heating technologies. Responding to the carrots and sticks of national and local government regulations and incentives, manufacturers in the sector rush headlong into developing and promoting various types of boiler, heat pump and combined-heat-power service. Commercial and residential property owners and users become the guinea pigs for these green ‘solutions’; eventually we discover that the technology either doesn’t work as it’s supposed to, and/or it has been badly commissioned, by which time, for the user it is too late to turn back the clock. To take one example: the stampede by local authorities towards specifying biomass boilers as part of the process of meeting local renewables targets is certainly cause for concern. Some of the questions surrounding this technology have been succinctly stated in a study by the
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sustainable buildings group, AECB (see News, page 10). A separate study of heat pumps by the Energy Saving Trust raises concerns about the performance, design and commissioning of this technology (see page 8). Such tests and trials of installations are, of course, crucial to identifying what works best and where. But, under pressure to become a cleantech nation, we are in danger of proliferating certain ‘solutions’ before establishing whether they are any such thing. The UK government’s planned Renewables
Users and installers
should be at the heart of our cleantech future
Heat Incentive and the push for feed-in tariffs are cases in point. Wholly laudable as they are, these carrots need to be provided with some thorough and serious health warnings about the technologies and installation services that are currently available. A less widespread but po- tentially powerful technology is electricity generated by hy- drogen fuel cells, which have been adopted for a number of commercial and public sector developments (see
page 57). All credit to Transport for London and others for taking a lead in applying this technology; we now need to sit back and take a cool look at the various performance outcomes, when they become available, before rushing to judgement. As another recent study – this time on smart meters (see page 12) – underlines, a great deal of the success of cleantech is down to the level of knowledge, understanding and commitment that users can bring to it operationally. And this is where the politicians have a duty to put education of users and installers at the heart of our cleantech future.
Bob Cervi, Editor
bcervi@cibsejournal.com October 2010 CIBSE Journal 5
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