CIBSE NATIONAL CONFERENCE
Panel members, left to right:
Bill Gething, Ian Meikle, Paul Finch and Terry Wyatt. Kate McCormick is out of view
Clients are looking to buy performance
Industry needs real, properly audited case studies to make green buildings credible, David Frise, head of sustainability at the HVCA, told delegates. The issue was a recurring
theme throughout the one-day event. ‘Credibility is a big issue,’ said Frise. ‘If the industry lacks credibility, we have a problem.’ Credibility is so important because, in the current climate, low carbon refurbishment is ‘simply the only game in town’. We really need to get
involved in this in a big way,’ according to Frise. ‘Clients
Still no answers to some fundamental questions
In the conference’s closing session, a panel of experts debated key issues raised by delegates. Paul Finch from CABE said that the industry should
not put all its eggs in one technology- solution basket. ‘The idea that we should exclude potential sources of power – such as extracting energy from shale – would be wrong.’ But Terry Wyatt, consultant to
Architect Bill Gething said the industry still lacked the
answers ‘to some very fundamental questions’ when it comes to the performance of buildings. Ian Meikle from the Technology
Hoare Lea, retorted that it was more important to reduce the requirement for more energy use. He added: ‘I believe nuclear energy is the wrong way
forward. We should be going for “dynamic demand management” which, for much less cost, can do a lot better.’
‘ The idea that we should exclude potential sources of power would be wrong’ Paul Finch
Strategy Board said it is still very diffi cult to get feedback from building performance. ‘Some buildings are out of control and need managing,’ he added. Kate McCromick from contractor
SPIE Matthew Hall said that it was also diffi cult to get investment for
district heating systems, because potential investors balked at a likely 30-year payback period for such schemes. ‘Can we take some of the risk away from them?’ she asked.
Sleepwalking into an energy crisis
The UK has been sleepwalking into a national energy crisis, and now has no clear policy to follow to create a fi rm retrofi tting strategy. Professor David Fisk of Imperial
College London gave the stark reality-check to delegates, declaring that the bigger picture was now ‘at least as unclear as the small picture’. Part of the problem, explained
Fisk, who is a CIBSE vice-president, was that during the boom years,
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not only was too much emphasis placed on new builds, but designers never said that growth was going too fast. He criticised industry for constructing new buildings that aren’t going to be around in 2050 – despite what the fi gures currently predict today. ‘We are an energy importer;
we don’t use our own coalfi elds anymore,’ said Fisk. ‘We are at the moment getting a quarter of our
gas via ships going through the no fl y zone in the middle of a Middle Eastern war! And all this we have sleepwalked into.’ He was also critical of how
20,000 heat pumps had been installed into developments, with no recorded performance of how well they work in practice. ‘Nothing ever works the fi rst
time, but if there’s no feedback it will be fi rst time instalments every time,’ said Fisk.
David Frise
are increasingly buying the performance, but not the product. ‘There’s a mass industry
out there – some call it the renewables industry, for example – that is actually not delivering.’ For the UK government,
said Frise, it’s about two things: carbon targets and energy security. But, said Frise: ‘We can’t deliver what many, many people are asking for, which is an energy generation system entirely predicated on renewables. If people accept blackouts, then we can do it, but nobody’s going to do that.’ Frise accused engineers
of not valuing what manufacturers do, but he also claimed that manufacturers very rarely put right blatant defects with their products. ‘We need to incorporate
manufacturers better because they have a huge amount of expertise to deliver on renewables and their people have done all the training.’
May 2011 CIBSE Journal
21
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