Assuring A Low Carbon Future

• Peter McConnachie – Passivhaus Manager – Robertson Construction Tayside
• Nicola Jackson- Net Zero Projects Lead – Robertson Construction Group
• Ann-Marie Fallon – Associate Director & Passivhaus Designer – Architype
• Will Jones – Head of Business Development – The A. Proctor Group Ltd
• Keira Proctor – Managing Director – A. Proctor Group Ltd (Host)

Quality

It is clear that there is a climate emergency and an urgent need to decarbonise, but to get there we need quality. A low-carbon future cannot happen without a clear emphasis on quality. Achieving this requires a driven approach from the moment someone writes the brief through to the use and operation of the building.

Across the construction industry, there are still serious misconceptions about what a low-carbon future means. Is it simply about offsetting, waiting for the grid to decarbonise, avoiding retrofit, or questioning whether high-performing buildings are really necessary?

The Need for a Blended Approach

In addition to the need for a decarbonisation agenda and greener electricity from the National Grid, we also need to focus on demand reduction. The Climate Change Committee has set this out in its reports, but it is still missing from many conversations about what net zero carbon really means.

Costs: Whole-Life Costs

We are now in a very volatile market, with the cost of everything going up. Material costs are rising, and energy costs continue to increase, mainly because the industry is still largely based on fossil fuels.

However, we need to look at energy costs not only in terms of the initial cost of the building, but also in terms of the whole-life cost of the building. Modular and offsite construction have applications that should be considered and learned from. Buildings need to be maintained properly to assure performance. Offsite construction can help assure as-built performance through quality control processes in the factory, continuous improvement through standardised processes, and automated systems that reduce human error. If buildings are constructed to the required quality, there are ways to achieve better performance, but we also need to deliver faster.

Delivery

Another crucial aspect of meeting net zero targets is understanding how to deliver a low-carbon building. As a client, what quantitative benchmarks do you set in your brief to ensure that the required service is delivered? What needs to be considered in relation to how the building is managed and monitored? How do we avoid net zero becoming a box-ticking exercise that fails to deliver the performance benefits required by 2045 or 2050? It is important to understand who is in control of the carbon gap in buildings and where responsibility rests.

Returning to quality, adopting a culture where more time and care are given to how buildings are delivered will help address that gap and support genuinely zero-carbon or low-carbon buildings.

Delivery is not only about operational carbon, but also embodied carbon. The BBC recently highlighted that there is only one PV recycling facility in the world, located in Grenoble, France, which opened in June 2023. This means that, currently, when PVs are placed on buildings, there is no global-scale end-of-life plan for managing them.

Methodologies

We need smart grid implementation, battery storage, and better ways of using energy in buildings. We also need to consider low-carbon construction methods, sustainable materials, and whole-life embodied carbon.

Passivhaus, which is designed in from the start and calculated well in advance, has an important role to play here. Passivhaus is an energy methodology focused on reducing operational carbon and operational energy, although it does not currently address embodied carbon or whole-life carbon. However, by targeting demand reduction and reducing operational carbon in buildings, the whole-life carbon of a building can be significantly reduced alongside a decarbonisation strategy for the fuel source.

Passivhaus is also a quality-assured methodology. It has been proven through the monitoring of buildings across Europe and the UK, and the approach has been successfully applied for the last three and a half decades in Europe and the last 15 years in the UK. Currently, there is not another global energy target based purely on building physics that has the same legacy of proven performance. To draw an analogy, if you bought a car that only had 50% of its checks completed on the production line, would you feel safe in that car, or think it represented value for money? Why, then, do we accept this with buildings? We procure and use buildings that do not satisfy all the quality-assured requirements needed to operate effectively, and ultimately they use more energy and place additional demand on the grid.