Ireland's only dedicated building services engineering journal
Ireland's only dedicated building services engineering journal

Compliance modelling not fit for climate challenges

Globally, commitments are being made by organisations to decarbonise their building assets by 2050. In parallel with this, legislators and green building councils are drawing up plans to set out roadmaps to achieve all this, which is set to become one of the greatest challenges the built environment has ever had to deal with. We know that buildings are responsible for 30% to 40% of energy consumption and CO2 emissions, and so all of us working in this industry have an obligation to dramatically reduce the impact that the built environment has on climate change.

John Treanor, Sustainability Engineer & Energy Analyst with Passive Dynamics Sustainability Consultants

The market demand for sustainable net zero carbon buildings is now increasing significantly and it’s not just coming from the senior executives – it’s now coming from the CEOs. At Passive Dynamics we believe that the regulatory environment is not pushing the agenda fast enough, and therefore it is up to the industry to take the lead.

While currently much of the focus is to comply with NZEB, it is very clear that this methodology and the modelling software assessments don’t go far enough to deal with the climate challenges that we will face before long. We need the regulatory bodies to clearly set out how future revisions of Technical Guidance Document Part L will go about addressing the net zero targets with key milestones every five years up to 2050.

Here we outline some of the key criteria that we feel needs to be addressed for future revisions.

See PDF of full article at buildingservicesengineering.ie/wp-content/uploads/Compliance-edit-pages-pdf.