The opening day of Build2Perform Live featured practical actions to help the UK accelerate its progress to meeting its 2050 emission targets
The flagship event of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) and the UK’s premier event for built environment solutions focused on the challenges the UK faces in reaching its net-zero carbon emission targets by 2050.
Baroness Brown, a member of the House of Lords and vice chair of the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) gave the keynote speech. She said that the CCC would be: “pushing the new government to improve building standards.”
Brown also urged CIBSE members to pursue practical actions to accelerate progress to close the gap between a building’s predicted energy use and its actual energy use. She said: “This is an area where you [CIBSE members] have a real opportunity to help the UK deliver net-zero carbon.”
Key themes from Build2Perform
The decarbonisation of energy was a key theme at the Build2Perform event with sessions including heat pump specification and integration, heating and cooling in a low carbon future, hydrogen applications and demand management.
Digitalisation to assist meeting emission targets was another big theme. The session on ‘Technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’ looked at advances in digital technologies that were fusing the digital world with the physical world.
The session included a presentation by Thayla Zomer from The Centre for Digital Built Britain where she highlighted the results of case studies looking at the construction industry performance since the government mandated the use of BIM.
Zomer explained that many construction firms had adopted BIM ‘symbolically’ but had not put in place the processes to reap maximum benefits from using BIM. She explained that if a business wants to introduce a new technology the research showed that: “It is not about doing new things in the same way but about doing new things in a new way.”
Fire Safety Engineering was another topical session given recent disasters such as Grenfell. This was presented by the authors of the CIBSE Guide E, discussing the key areas of responsibility for building services engineers such as preventing and containing fires and ensuring means of escape.
Day two
Day two of the event (28 November) at London’s Olympia will include sessions on changes to Parts L and F of the Building Regulations in addition to sessions on upgrading homes and retrofitting buildings to improve energy efficiency and to meet emission targets.
There will also be sessions on climate change and its impact on the resilience of schools, assessing the risk of overheating homes and adapting buildings to severe weather. Other events will focus on health and wellbeing, modular and offsite construction and digitalisation.
