Existing stock - in its infancy

To the Design Museum yesterday to chair a conference entitled Retrofitting & Energy Management. I was given a matter of days to prepare for this so was rather relieved that the whole thing went pretty smoothly. The presentations and ensuing discussions on what and how to address energy use in our existing stock could be summed up pretty briefly - we’re in the Dark Ages right now in the sense of knowing what best to do and actually making it happen. Where to start with the problems we are all facing in tackling this urgent need?

A few key points were raised:

• Are we on the right lines to start with? One of the most illuminating talks was from Chris Jofeh, a director from Arup who is carrying out some detailed research in this field. He put up a slide of early indications from his research, comparing the longer term carbon-saving benefits for three options: rebuilding old stock; refurbishing; or keeping the building as is but changing behaviours of the occupants. The curve for the first was as you expect, offering a major benefit but only after 40-50 years. The second started to payback between 20 to 30 years, while the third held its own in carbon terms for about 20 years. Jofeh stressed this was early work but the graph formed part of his emerging view that it is the softer and cultural side that is the critical factor in us tackling energy from buildings rather than harder technical solutions. It chimes with what I’ve noticed in witnessing goings on in the field for over 18 months - the switch from the the rush to zero carbon and wildly ambitious targets for emissions cuts to the reality check that the problem is a much more nuanced and subtle than that. So our initial preoccupations of smashing down or reconfiguring or creating a new utopia of low carbon buildings was most probably a flawed one.
• Consistency - Of data, of practice of approach. Current legislation is doing something to tackle the need to collect information on how buildings perform and what the best solutions are to reducing their footprints, but boy is there a way to go. EPCs are upon us, but are being implemented in different ways in different countries, which makes comparisons between buildings very difficult. And Bill Wright from John Lewis bemoaned the lack of consistency in the approach of retailers to measuring their buildings as holding them back from introducing Display Energy Certificates in their estate.
• Bureaucracy - Anna Halcro-Johnston from the Carbon Trust, who have worked up a guide to Low Carbon Refurbishments of Buildings, was pretty candid when she spoke about her experiences tracking case studies of refurbishments. She said she was shocked at skills levels and the fragmentation of the industry (welcome to construction) which was holding back communications between different professions and parts of the supply chain when you tried to make improvements or to measure energy use in the first place. And consultant Darren Ball from Novarama also voiced his frustration at the process of producing EPCs - it makes you concentrate on amassing ridiculous amounts of details rather than concentrating on the advice you can give building owners and occupiers to make significant inroads into energy efficiency.

Market forces are clearly driving towards existing buildings, given that there is bugger all money to spend on new ones. Hopefully this can further build up momentum for a concerted push on addressing these fundamental barriers to addressing the existing stock.