SPECIAL REPORT Ӏ ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
“So it then becomes application engineering. Somebody has a problem to solve: we at UKRI are not going to be the ones to sit there and engineer the solution but we can say ‘Hey, you might want to talk to A and B and C: these people are working in just the area you need.’ So we are definitely building that ecosystem of the electrified technologies that is absolutely critical to the future.”
EFFICIENCY ADDS VALUE More than just different cranes are needed: it is a whole different philosophy of construction. “It is all about trying to make the construction industry work more efficiently," Drury continues. "As you are no doubt aware the construction industry works very inefficiently at the moment. More than 50% of activity is not value-adding. You've got people waiting around for things, people who are operating machinery will be sitting there with
This 900t topside was moved by Mammoet using HVO fuel, with significantly low carbon footprint
it idling for significant proportion of the time waiting for other things to happen and blasting out noxious gases while it waits. And that is not environmentally friendly at all. At the moment construction sites work on a frankly ad hoc basis: materials and labour show up if you're lucky roughly when you expect them, and you do lots of work on site. Where we want to get to is a situation where the majority of value-added work is done off site. “Wall assemblies, bathroom pods, cladding panels and so forth can be manufactured and put together in factories. Bring the prefabricated units to the site. You can then lift them and put them in place very efficiently and you end up with fewer deliveries, faster and much more efficient operation (which you have rehearsed already in virtual reality), much less in the way of cutting and shaping and fitting on site. "And that that vision involves
everybody's time and equipment being used highly efficiently, and taking a fraction of the time on site – and in huge saving in energy use and emissions.”
That vision will affect the types of crane that are wanted. Already prefabricated concrete cladding for high-rises are increasing the demand for larger-capacity cranes to lift and place them. The hope is that this will spread throughout the UK house-building sector, as it already has to a large extent in the US.
“It is happening, with
considerable momentum, at the moment,” says Drury. “One of the reasons for that is the UK government’s procurement policy with regard to buildings. The government spends between 20 and 40 billion pounds a year on hospitals, roads and the like. In December 2020, as a result of the ‘Transforming Construction’ challenge, they rewrote the rules f
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