Round Table Energy in buildings


The


participants


CHAIR


DECC


INDUSTRY EXPERT


David Fisk Prof. of engineering for sustainable development, Imperial College London


Emma Fraser


head of Green Deal Capital Markets, DECC


David Smithson


business unit head, Siemens Building Technologies


Bob Rice building engineering services policy and standards manager, Royal Mail Group


Stuart Laidlaw national technical facilities manager, Capital & Regional / The Mall


Andy Stanton


head of sustainable buildings, Transport for London


Neil Pennell


head of sustainability and engineering, Land Securities


doing energy savings for the last 12 years and saved 30% in our shopping centres. But I’ve moved away from the percentage setting and


it’s now about what CO2 levels a building is going to do in five years.


Also, I can’t understand the phrase ‘zero carbon’. ‘Low carbon’ I understand, but not ‘zero’.


Toby Marlow: I’ve heard about ten defini- tions for ‘zero carbon’ and none of them really make sense.


We’ve just embarked on 18 months of understanding what carbon reduction means to us, and trying to weave a long-term strategy into the world of CRC, renewable heating, all the incentives, etc. It’s a minefield. Business needs to help government define what [zero carbo] looks like. We’re taking the idea of immovable metrics as a sensible one, but we’re defining our own.


Gemma Wilson: The public sector has exactly the same problem. For local authorities, some- times it’s a bit harder because we are looked to from government to lead the way. But all the incentives for us are relatively short term


Andy Stanton: I want to say something about the percentages: It’s important to recognise


36 | Sustainable Business | June 2011


Toby Marlow engineering manager, feasibility, John Lewis Partnership


David Halford head of ethical sourcing and environmental policy, BBC Worldwide


that a lot of it is dependent on the scientific rigour behind how percentages are set. It’s also about how you translate the targets. We might aim for a 10% [cut in emissions], but 5% would still be very good. That’s OK if that’s how you explain it. Percentage targets are good if they engender change in behaviour; if it forces engineers to rethink and change their behaviour.


David Fisk: What’s the feeling about whether in the UK national strategy we really ought to have quite such a strong focus on new build? Is refurb a bit of a Cinderella in this story?


Andy Stanton: What’s important is getting the difference between refurbishment and retrofit. And there ought to be provisions in building regulations for refurbishment.


John Gilbert: Do we believe that refurb


is carried out solely for carbon reduction, or is


it just the add-on? Maybe we ought


to be presenting to businesses a real cost opportunity to reduce energy consumption, through refurb, through fit-out or through new buildings.


Neil Pennell: In our world, where we’re commercially redeveloping buildings, there’s


John Gilbert


head of energy and carbon, Thames Water


Gemma Wilson


carbon management officer, West Sussex County Council


a natural cycle where the building is coming to the end of its life and you need to refresh it and get it back into the marketplace – and building regulations apply again, underpin- ning the process.


When it comes to retrofit, we really have to think a lot harder. Maybe by calling it ‘ret- rofit’ it differentiates it from refurbishment. Although it is akin to refurbishment in so far as you’re going into an existing building to improve the building’s performance, whether that’s the fabric, its services or its operational controls. You have to look at that in terms of payback criteria, making a business case for the investment. If it is driven by a desire to merely refresh the office, that should be part of the equation, but it should then include more efficient lighting and better lighting control, for example.


But building regulations don’t really cover the retrofit area. And maybe there could be incentives, because it is harder to make a busi- ness case in a commercial context. For new build or refurbishment we’re repositioning a product in the marketplace. But for retrofit, there has to be a reason to reduce carbon and to somehow incentivise that process.


Andy Stanton: We’ve just gone through a major retrofit programme of 22 buildings


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