ENERGY AND CARBON-SAVING
Engineering Policy Centre also had a ‘Net Zero explainer’ – ‘an excellent guide to some of the concepts people use when discussing Net Zero’, such as the various greenhouse gases, and the differences between Absolute and Net Zero. The RAE is also, he explained, ‘close to unveiling’ further publications on issues relevant to healthcare estate management/ healthcare engineering professionals, particularly on decarbonising construction, an issue which had been ‘shooting up the Royal Academy of Engineering agenda’, with construction, in his view, an industry ‘now just starting to get to grips’ with the Net Zero Carbon agenda.
Embedded carbon
Dr Starkey said the topic of embodied carbon, i.e. that which goes into the production of building materials, was becoming ever more significant, with energy efficiency having improved, and the embodied carbon sometimes ‘an under-observed, but very significant part of, the carbon of our landscape’. The National Engineering Policy Centre would be publishing a document on it ‘within the next month or so’.
Looking at how one embeds whole life carbon assessment into decision-making, and particularly public procurement, was another priority. The RAE speaker said: “Government procurement is not only, of course, responsible for a significant proportion of the estate in this country, but can very often set the standards for other industries to follow. We need to look carefully at how we define and scale up best practice in low carbon construction and procurement, and apply it to both new buildings and refurbishments, and at how we drive Net Zero principles into engineering education. I think there is so much further to go across engineering as a whole to ensure that engineering education is contextualised within the challenge of sustainability, i.e. as being the context for everything that engineers do, rather than simply one small module on the side of an otherwise technically driven education.”
The Academy's forthcoming ‘low regrets’ paper, due out soon, would thus seek to help people understand – with ‘a systems perspective’ – which ‘low regrets’ measures they could take now, ‘without knowing everything’. Dr Starkey said: “These ‘low regrets’ measures are not the same as what some would dub ‘low- hanging fruit’; we have done most of the work in that space already. They might in fact be very hard things to do, but these measures are steps you can take now without worrying you’ll regret them too much later. They are things which are which appear in all future scenarios – elements which have ‘co-benefits’; for instance, things which provide cleaner air as well are much less likely to be regretted in the future.”
Reducing costs
The Royal Academy NEPC’s Sustainable Living Places report is “based around how you create sustainable, ‘happy’ places people want to live in”.
Paper on ‘low regret’ measures Another publication being produced by the Academy, which Dr Starkey encouraged attendees to look out for, was a paper on how to take ‘low regret’ measures. He elaborated: “One of the challenges of promoting an engineer’s systems approach to decarbonisation – fully necessary though that is – is that you can take a policy-maker from a problem that they knew, from the outset, was quite complicated, show them vastly more complexity they need to get their head around, and leave them feeling more bewildered than before. Of course, it is right to confront the complexity, but do I honestly need to understand all the prospects for hydrogen electricity in transport etc. before I can take my first steps to decarbonising the estate? How can I move if everything is interconnected, and I seem to need to understand everything, before I can understand anything?”
The ‘low regret’ measures might also typically be things that reduce costs for the future, and, ‘really crucially’, initiatives which ‘open up options, rather than creating path-dependencies which reduce options for the future’. Examples, the speaker said, included large-scale demonstration projects and large-scale deployments of proven technologies. He said: “I could not agree more with what Dame Sue said in closing – that the fact that you have a working small-scale technology does not necessarily mean either that it will work at scale, or in the context of all the other things you are doing simultaneously.” The Academy had been calling for some time for more large- scale demonstration projects. Dr Starkey said: “For instance, on carbon capture and storage, going back to the Prime Minister’s Ten Point Plan, the prospects for hydrogen depend a lot of carbon capture and storage if we are to actually ‘do’ green hydrogen at a much bigger scale than we are currently.” This would require a ‘scale-up’ of demonstration technology so policy-makers could see how these technologies work ‘in the real world’. It was the Academy's thesis, ‘although contested by some’, that the challenge of Net Zero by 2050 ‘wasn’t
June 2021 Health Estate Journal 47
©Royal Academy of Engineering
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