A Critique on the UK’s Net Zero Strategy

Before the Covid-19 pandemic UK passed net-zero emission law legislation to become the first major economy in the world to end its contribution to global warming by 2050. Following the UK’s legislation to reach net-zero emissions, a long-term strategy for transition to a net-zero target was published in 2021. The strategy is a technology-led and with a top-down approach. The intention is to reach the target over the next three decades. The document targets seven sectors to reduce emissions and include a wide range of policies and innovations for decarbonization. This paper aims to accomplish a much needed review of the strategy in heat and buildings part and cover the key related areas in future buildings standard, heat pumps and use of hydrogen as elaborated in the strategy. For that purpose, this research reviews key themes in the policy, challenges, recent advancement and future possibilities. It provides an insight on the overall development toward sustainability and decarbonization of built environment in the UK by 2050. A foresight model, Future Wheels is also used to visualize the findings from the review and provide a clear picture of the potential impact of the policy

Performance evaluation of well-insulated versions of contemporary wall systems—A case study of London for a warmer climate

Climate change and its consequences are of a great concern and the likely increasing temperature would add more dilemmas for the choice of passive design options. The performance of building envelopes is one of the key determinants of energy use and thermal comfort. This research presents an evaluation of commonly used construction systems (lightweight and heavyweight) with different levels of thermal mass. The performance of different construction combinations is quantified on the basis of their impact on thermal comfort and energy consumption for current and future time slices in London, UK where climate change impact is expected to be extreme. A flat model is examined as a case study to model the performance of the construction systems with low, medium and high level of thermal mass. The dynamic thermal simulation software used was DesignBuilder, which employs EnergyPlus as its calculation engine. In essence, this study establishes a new approach for assessing the performance of well-insulated contemporary construction systems on the basis of overall annual thermal comfort hours and energy consumption. Results indicate limited advantage of heavyweight construction systems in a changing climate

Risk identification in the early design stage using thermal simulations—A case study

The likely increasing temperature predicted by UK Climate Impacts Program (UKCIP) underlines the risk of overheating and potential increase in cooling loads in most of UK dwellings. This could also increase the possibility of failure in building performance evaluation methods and add even more uncertainty to the decision-making process in a low-carbon building design process. This paper uses a 55-unit residential unit project in Cardiff, UK as a case study to evaluate the potential of thermal simulations to identify risk in the early design stage. Overheating, increase in energy loads, carbon emissions, and thermal bridges are considered as potential risks in this study. DesignBuilder (DesignBuilder Software Ltd., Stroud, UK) was the dynamic thermal simulation software used in this research. Simulations compare results in the present, 2050, and 2080 time slices and quantifies the overall cooling and heating loads required to keep the operative temperature within the comfort zone. Overall carbon emissions are also calculated and a considerable reduction in the future is predicted. Further analysis was taken by THERM (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA) and Psi THERM (Passivate, London, UK) to evaluate the thermal bridge risk in most common junctions of the case study and the results reveal the potential of thermal assessment methods to improve design details before the start of construction stage

Future proofing UK sustainable homes under conditions of climatic uncertainty

Research relating to the potential impacts of climate change on UK housing has increased in recent years. The future performance of dwellings that are currently considered sustainable may change under a changing climate. For example, well insulated, air tight homes that are energy efficient and comfortable now may be at risk of overheating in the future. Decision-making for sustainable house designs may become more challenging regarding dwellings that will perform well now and be resilient to climate change risks, such as overheating, in the future. This study evaluates the effect of overheating risk and future climatic uncertainty in designing UK dwellings. The main focus of the research is on the thermal performance of the external building envelope. The foremost aim is to future proof current designs in order to provide the best possible thermal comfort under likely warmer weather conditions produced by climate change. This research examines a number of constructional design options to reduce energy consumption and improve thermal comfort on the basis of climate change predictions up to 2080. The study develops a methodology by means of computer simulations to assess and predict the performance (in terms of total energy input, both heating and cooling, required to maintain thermal comfort) in a range of current, ‘high performance’ construction systems used on simple and typical UK house models in London and Manchester. The findings of this study show that UK sustainable homes, in their present format, are susceptible to a future overheating risk. It is argued that the substantial part of the overheating risk can be alleviated by the integration of modern smart materials and conventional design solutions, such as shading devices and earth-to-air heat exchangers (EAHE). The research also proposes a new method of integrating phase change materials into the building envelope to reduce domestic cooling loads and overheating hours in the coming decades

Audit Committee Quality and Financial Reporting Quality: A Study of Selected Indian Companies

This study examines audit committee quality and its relationship with financial reporting quality. The population of this study consists of the companies listed in Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) between years 2002 and 2012. Using Godden sample size formula, 133 companies are selected randomly for the study. It is found that in most of the equity based listed companies at BSE under study have complied with the legal formalities, for instance, appointment of independent directors, number of meetings, size of the audit committee, legal qualifications and financial qualifications of the directors, as they were required for the listing at a stock exchange in India. Further, the analysis and tests state that board size, audit committee meetings and its size have relationship with the financial reporting practices, but the CEO tenure and hold, board independence, net income, proportion of independent directors on board, legal qualifications and financial qualifications of the directors and overlap of audit committee members on compensation committee, have no influence on the financial reporting practices. Thus, it may be inferred that the companies may improve the financial reporting quality, by managing the board size, audit committee meetings and size, as these characteristics have significant relationship with financial reporting quality

An Expandable, Contextualized and Data-Driven Indoor Thermal Comfort Model

Continuous discrepancies in building performance predictions creates an ongoing inclination to link contextualized, real-time inputs and users’ feedback for not only building control systems but also for simulation tools. It is now seeming necessary to develop a model that can record, find meaningful relationship and predict more holistic human interactions in buildings. Such model could create capacity for feedback and control with a level of intelligence. Fuzzy Logic Systems (FLSs) are known as robust tools in decision making and developing models in an efficient manner. Considering this capability, in this paper, FLSs is implemented to make a thermal comfort model in an educational building in the UK. Such implementation has an ability to respond to some identified desires of developers and performance assessors in addressing uncertainty in thermal comfort models. The results demonstrate the proposed method is practical to simulate the value of comfort level based on the input data

Regression Models for Predicting the Global Warming Potential of Thermal Insulation Materials

The impacts and benefits of thermal insulations on saving operational energy have been widely investigated and well-documented. Recently, many studies have shifted their focus to comparing the environmental impacts and CO2 emission-related policies of these materials, which are mostly the Embodied Energy (EE) and Global Warming Potential (GWP). In this paper, machine learning techniques were used to analyse the untapped aspect of these environmental impacts. A collection of over 120 datasets from reliable open-source databases including Okobaudat and Ecoinvent, as well as from the scientific literature containing data from the Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), was compiled and analysed. Comparisons of Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), Support Vector Regression (SVR), Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) regression, and Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) regression methods were completed for the prediction task. The experimental results revealed that MLR, SVR, and LASSO methods outperformed the XGBoost method according to both the K-Fold and Monte-Carlo cross-validation techniques. MLR, SVR, and LASSO achieved 0.85/0.73, 0.82/0.72, and 0.85/0.71 scores according to the R2 measure for the Monte-Carlo/K-Fold cross-validations, respectively, and the XGBoost overfitted the training set, showing it to be less reliable for this task. Overall, the results of this task will contribute to the selection of effective yet low-energy-intensive thermal insulation, thus mitigating environmental impacts

Heating and Cooling Loads in High Performance Construction Systems-Will Climate Change Alter Design Decisions?

Climate change and its consequences are of great concern. Buildings can be affected by climate change in different ways, such as changes in energy needs and thermal comfort. However, the challenge is to quantify and assess the uncertainties involved in future climate data as well as the relevant adoption strategies. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate potential energy consumption changes in high performance building construction systems in a changing climate. In this paper, current and future weather data of three time slices of 2020, 2050 and 2080 were used to simulate the performance of a simple building in Manchester and London using DesignBuilder software which employs Energy Plus as its calculation engine. Five of the most commonly used and high performance construction systems were examined in terms of energy consumption in this model and results are given. In general, this paper provides a useful methodology for simplification in design decision-making for current and future UK housing. It is observed that future climate scenarios do not have major effects in qualitative comparisons of construction systems

User Perception on Key Performance Indicators in an In-Service Office Building

A holistic understanding of the correlations between supply and demand in buildings forms the basis for their performance assessment. This paper aims to reinterpret a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that influence users’ satisfaction from different perspectives. Fieldwork was carried out in an office building following a detailed review on KPIs by conducting user surveys. This study highlights the need to organize specific indicators to focus on the usability of workplaces and, where and when required, through an iterative process, understand the user perception of performance indicators in usage conditions. This methodology is applicable for organizations to understand the main existing in-service problems, and could improve the building’s performance over time. Survey results showed that hygiene was the most recognizable influence on users’ satisfaction and indoor air quality was the less well-known in the assessment results. User perception results can be compared to other office buildings results to benchmark good practices and should also be investigated for the post-COVID-19 period

Assessing and Monitoring of Building Performance by Diverse Methods

Buildings are one of the largest contributors to energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the world. There is an increased interest in building performance evaluation as an essential practice to design a sustainable building. Building performance is influenced by various terms, for example, designs, construction-related factors such as building envelope and airtightness, and energy technologies with or without micro-generations. How well a building performs thermally is key to determining the level of energy demand and GHG emissions. Building standards and regulations, in combination with assessments (e.g., energy modeling tools) and certifications, provide sets of supports, guidelines and instructions for designers and building engineers to ensure users’ health and well-being, consistency in construction practices and environmental protection. This paper reviews, evaluates and suggests a sequence of building performance methods from the UK perspective. It shows the relationships between such methods, their evolutions and related tools, and further highlights the importance of post-occupancy analysis and how crucial such assessments could be for efficient buildings