Sustainable cities

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Sustainable cities

Opening shots René Carayol

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OT EVERYTHING that is new is great, and not everything that is old is broken and bad.

We must remember this when it comes to sustainable and smart cities around our planet.

The whole urbanisation movement was born at the turn of the last century as industrialisation spread around the world, and many left rural areas to find work in the factories springing up in cities.

This enduring march to the urban areas demands new thinking and solutions, but progress can come incrementally, as well as starting from scratch. The “old” city of Amsterdam is constantly modifying with many new initiatives ranging from something called “Climate Street”, which aims to reduce the energy use of an entire shopping street, to connecting ships to the electricity grid so that they no longer have to use diesel generators when moored in the city’s ports.

There are some exciting developments in terms of building brand new cities from scratch, and logic informs us that if you were trying to build a city for 10 million people today, it probably would not look and feel like contemporary London.

London has suffered from overcrowding, too much traffic, creaking infrastructure,

THE ESSENTIALS

Publisher Bradley Scheffer | Editor Daniel Evans | Production Editor Dan Geary

Why it’s time for the data gatherers of London to pool their resources increasing pollution, not enough green spaces and not enough houses being built at the rate to accommodate its forever burgeoning population.

However, the London 2012 Summer Olympics was not the unmitigated disaster many predicted, with the arrival of tens of thousands of visitors to what many saw as an under-maintained infrastructure. In fact, London got its act together – and how!

Transport for London made its rich source of data available for all to benefit from.

Many different organisations were able to monitor traffic flows, potential congestion and, most of all, the habits of residents and tourists. This enabled London to deliver one of the most memorable events anywhere in recent years, without overheating. How much more could be done if all the data gatherers of London pooled their resources, liberated their data and proved the point that collaboration is the new leadership?

Many urbanisation experts point to Singapore as perhaps a model city for the

The Co-operative Group Headquarters, Manchester Highest-ever BREEAM (2008) score for a new build

One Pancras Square King’s Cross, London Highest-ever BREEAM (2011) post completion score for an office

future. In the Eighties Singapore became hugely congested and started down the road of automation, culminating with the use of satellites to determine where vehicles are. This enabled better, more proactive traffic management.

There has been a lot of talk and some hype around the building of the futuristic Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. The plan was to build the city on a raised platform that would house all the smart new-age infrastructure, sensors, networking and meters. This would ensure future inventions would be intercepted immediately, without major works that would disrupt everyone and everything.

The same for another new city, Songdo, near Seoul in South Korea. Both were looking to be home to some 50,000 to 60,000 residents. But it is both complex and expensive. The exciting PlanIT Valley, near Porto in Portugal, was a surprising location for another futuristic city, this time looking to be home to nearly 250,000 people.

The completion dates for all of these crucial ground-breaking initiatives have drifted into the future as costs multiply and, due to the global recession, they are looking less affordable by the year. Having a top-down approach, as in Masdar and Songdo, versus the bottom-up approach of London and Amsterdam, is no bad thing as we search for sustainable solutions.

But it is not about escaping the pull of the past; it is so much more about embracing the new, as even older cities have to constantly change and adapt.

Somerstown Community Hub, Portsmouth designed and built by BAM with low embodied carbon

expert in

sustainable development, design, construction and facilities management sustainability.bam.co.uk

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Thermal slashes Glasgow heating bills by 75 per cent

By Tim Adler GLASGOW residents could save up to three quarters of their heating bills if a plan to heat homes using geothermal power goes ahead.

Up to 40 per cent of Glasgow households could use water recycled from abandoned mines beneath the city. The water is heated up using thermal pumps and flushed round building radiators.

Seventeen flats in Glenalmond Street, in the east end of Glasgow, have been using thermal power for the past 10 years, cutting heating bills from around £800 for a three-bedroom flat to just £180 a year.

A “demonstrator” project for the next generation of thermal pumps is planned for the Clyde Gateway in eastern Glasgow, while another one is set for Shawfair in Midlothian, in 2016.

An estimated 600,000 cubic kilometres of water is trapped beneath Glasgow. Thermal pumps draw up tepid water and run it through heat exchangers, heating the water up to around 50°C, which is then sent around radiators. The water is eventually sent back down underground, having cooled off first.

Glasgow City Council is exploring shared heating schemes already. The council is looking at areas of the city that could share a single massive gas-fired boiler as opposed to hundreds of individual ones. Thermal heating is already popular in Hamburg and Stockholm, where under-street heating took off in the Seventies.

Glasgow Caledonia University is currently mapping all the abandoned mine workings and boreholes beneath Glasgow city centre. Glasgow University has donated its 3D map of Glasgow, which Dr Nicholas Hytiris and his researchers are adapting. Hytiris is using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to geographically

Glasgow’s energy bills could be reduced by the untapped geothermal energy beneath its streets

locate where the water is contained. And the Glasgow Caledonia University team is also investigating Glasgow’s underground tube system as well as its canals.

Tapping geothermal energy from old coal mines across Scotland’s central belt – which stretches from Glasgow to Edinburgh – could even supply up to a third of the nation’s heat demand.

Water piped up from abandoned mine shafts between Glasgow and Edinburgh, as well as in Ayrshire and Fife, could heat thousands of homes and other buildings for decades, according to

River energy finally comes on-stream THOUSANDS of city homes could be heated by energy from local rivers.

Floating pumps sucking energy from England’s rivers could heat up to 20,000 homes, according to the latest government thinking. Cities that could benefit include London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Sheffield and Nottingham.

Heat pumps draw residual heat from rivers that is fed into local networks or single buildings to provide low-carbon energy. Energy minister Ed Davey (inset) believes that, at a time when Russian gas

supplies look increasingly fragile, river-based heat pumps could meet some of England’s energy needs.

Water is one thing that rain-sodden England is not short of.

The Department of Energy & Climate Change published a map earlier this month showing rivers and estuaries across England that could provide clean, reliable energy. The map listed around 40 urban rivers and estuaries that could provide large-scale renewable heating through heat pumps. Each has the capacity to power around

the Scottish government.

Indeed, the entire country has enough geothermal energy to provide clean, green heat for everybody. Engineers at Glasgow University have calculated there is roughly twice the amount of untapped thermal energy in hot rocks deeper underground as there is in abandoned mine workings near the surface.

Scotland wants 40 per cent of its energy to come from renewable sources by 2040. Given that flooded mines alone could meet one third of Scotland’s energy needs, the Scottish government should support thermal energy

400-500 homes. Davey said: “It sounds like magic, but using proven technology we can now extract some of the heat in our rivers and estuaries and use that energy to heat our homes and offices. If we can succeed on the large scale, it would cut Britain’s import bill and boost our home-grown supplies of clean, secure energy.”

A residential development in Surrey is being used to trial the technology.

Residents at Kingston Heights in Richmond Park are saving 20 per cent on heating bills using power drawn from the Thames. The trial system provides hot water for

nationwide, says Richard Dixon, director of Friends of the Earth. The government should offer grants to developers who install it in properties.

Dixon thinks that any new building in Glasgow should have to explore options for thermal heating first rather than install gas-fired boilers. He said: “Once this gets going on a large scale, I think this is really going to take off.”

Hytiris added: “This is not new technology; it’s been around for a long time. But now we’re exploiting it because of the energy problems we have in Scotland.”

150 homes and a 140-room hotel, saving 500 tons of carbon emissions that would otherwise pollute the atmosphere through traditional gas-fired or electric boilers. It is the first time water pump technology has been used for mass housing.

David MacKay, chief energy adviser to DECC and professor of engineering at Cambridge University, has called this combination of heat pumps and low-carbon electricity the future of building heating.

The water is drawn from two metres below the surface of the Thames, where latent heat is sustained at a constant temperature of between 8°C and 10°C.

Sceptics argue that this kind of river-based energy is marginal at best and useless for the massive amounts of energy cities need.

Conservationists worry that dropping the heat in rivers will kill off animals that depend on warmer river temperatures, such as water voles and otters.

Local heat networks currently provide only 2 per cent of the overall heating demand in the UK. The government is keen to introduce lower carbon energy generation into cities in order to meet strict European Union emissions targets.

Europe wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030, and 27 per cent of energy needs to come from renewable sources.

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Sustainable cities

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Key to economic growth: Turkey’s energy policies in the next decade Sustainable energy is at the heart of Turkey’s continuing economic resurgence INDUSTRY VIEW

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he energy sector has a crucial role for Turkey, a country that is on its way to enter the world’s top 10 economies by 2023. Ensuring the supply security and sustainable growth while maintaining environmentally sensitive policies remain the top priorities for the Turkish government to reach this goal.

In the energy sector, especially in the last 10 years, important steps have been taken, which include introducing special incentives and improvement of the legislation to attract global investors. The sum of these efforts resulted in a highly competitive market structure.

A growing domestic market Electricity demand in Turkey has seen a greater growth than the GDP growth of the country, which has reached the highest growth rate after China in 2011. A capacity of 7,000MW was added in 2013, half of which coming from renewable sources. Turkey’s installed capacity has reached 66,000MW as of the end of 2013 while the private sector’s share and role has been increasing. In the last 10 years, the share of the IPP-independent power producers – in the installed power capacity has surged from 18 per cent to 50 per cent and also with the ongoing 16,000 MW installed power capacity privatisation programme, this share is expected to increase.

With 66,000MW installed power capacity, Turkey is the sixth-largest market in Europe.

When this capacity doubles in 2023, Turkey will become the third-largest electricity market after Germany and France. To reach this target, the total investment amount in the fields of generation, transmission and distribution is expected to reach more than US$100billion. As the Investment Support and Promotion Agency of Turkey (ISPAT), we contribute to the growth by working with the international investors who would like to expand their investment portfolio into Turkey, facilitating each and every step they take when making an investment.

Towards a greener future The usage of renewable energy resources is essential. The Turkish government has set a target to carry the share of renewable energy resources in generation up to 30 per cent by the year 2023. To achieve this goal, Turkey needs to have 40,000MW of hydro, 20,000MW of wind and 3,000 MW of solar-installed capacity.

In order to reach these goals, a FIT (feed-in-tariff) mechanism is put in place. The amount of FIT to be received is 7.3 US cents/kWh for hydro and wind power plants, 13.3 cents/kWh for solar and biomass and 10.5 cents/kWh for geothermal power plants for 10 years. Improving the local industry with technology transfers and providing employment through these investments are also vital goals.

Therefore, up to 50 per cent of local content FIT is provided if 55 per cent of the equipment used in these power plants is manufactured in Turkey.

In addition, equipment manufacturers will be able to take advantage of Strategic, Large or Regional incentives depending on the scope and amount of their investments.

The installed capacity of wind power plants at the end of 2013 is 3,000MW where the project stock with generation licenses is 11,000MW. In the next 10 years, upon reaching the 20,000MW of installed wind power, Turkey will become the third-largest onshore wind market in Europe.

The projected 10-year goal for utility-scale solar power plants is 3,000MW. As a first step 600MW of capacity will be allocated. Applications have been received for this capacity, and the licences will be issued this year. For systems below 1MW there is no need for a generation licence. Hotels, shopping

centres and industrial buildings with rooftop applications give investors important opportunities. These systems also have the potential to sell the extra energy they produce to the network and benefit from the FIT mechanism.

Among the projects pursued by ISPAT in this area are investments on both silicon-based technology and thin-film technology cell and panel manufacturing plants. By virtue of these investments solar investors will be able to receive up to 50 per cent local contribution support. In addition, equipment manufacturers will be able to take advantage of Strategic, Large or Regional incentives depending on the scope and amount of their investments.

By the end of 2013, geothermal energy manufacturing capacity in Turkey had reached 300MW. European Geothermal Council (EGEC) forecasts installed capacity for the end of 2016 to be 975MW including the projects in the pipeline.

Considering the short payback period, the private sector shows great interest in the geothermal projects. For the next five years the magnitude of equipment market is forecasted to hit US$800m. info@invest.gov.tr www.invest.gov.tr

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Sustainable cities

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Innovating to zero The futuristic metropolises of science-fiction may soon be here for real – thanks to existing cities signing up to sustainable technology

By Tim Adler 07:30am. The alarm sounds in your bedroom mirror summoning you out of bed. The curtains, which are also controlled by your home’s smart system, pull back to reveal another beautiful day in Eco City.

08:15am. By now you are on your way to the office in a two-person electric vehicle. You are working on your tablet computer – cars stopped having steering wheels years ago – when your fridge flashes up that you are out of milk. Happily a drone will drop a carton by your front door later this morning. Sunlight glints off the mirrored city control tower in the distance. Sensors monitor everything, from transport to energy and waste management systems, warning controllers when infrastructure is about to fail. Watching the blades of the wind farm lazily circle, you feel strangely comforted that everything in this metropolis is watched and measured.

08:59am. You are hurrying into work, having dropped off your EV at a communal charging point – a bit like those “Boris bike” racks that used to be in London. Adverts recognise you and start pushing offers tailored specifically for you, but you don’t have time for that – you have a meeting at nine.

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As tech firms invest, cities such as London, Amsterdam and Hamburg are slowly being pushed towards sustainability

HIS may sound a bit Tomorrow’s World, all silver jumpsuits and space food, but it is a future that is coming to be, according to urban planners Business Reporter spoke to.

It may never be possible to create a fully zero-emission metropolis, but the drive towards reducing carbon emissions represents a tremendous business opportunity for the eco-entrepreneur.

London’s population is set to increase by 37 per cent to more than 11 million by 2050, a figure recently pointed out by mayor Boris Johnson. Currently, the capital has just over eight million inhabitants. That means it needs to build about 50,000 new homes a year to meet demand. There will also be increasing pressure on water and energy supplies.

One startling statistic is that the top 10 per cent of Londoners use one third of the capital’s energy. “There’s not only financial inequality but energy inequality,” says climate change expert Professor Harriet Bulkeley (right) of Durham University.

To counter this, companies are pushing the idea that sensors will monitor utility usage, switching off power

where needed. Tech giant Cisco recently signed a deal with Amsterdam in April to help it become one of the world’s most sustainable cities by 2040. Amsterdam has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to tecnology – it was the first city to be connected to the internet 25 years ago. Cisco also signed a similar deal in May to create pilot traffic management, lighting and infrastructure testing projects for Hamburg.

“Today, cities are in competition – same as companies,” says Michael Ganser, Cisco SVP of Central and Eastern Europe. “They are looking for ways to create jobs, drive profitable growth and productivity, become more efficient and – most importantly – increase the quality of life for residents.”

However, Bulkeley questions whether the push for smart cities really comes from tech companies hoping for fat contracts. She sees the sustainable city as a more low-tech enterprise.

Basic maintenance, such as fixing potholes and resurfacing cycle lanes, will become increasingly important – not just inserting sensors all over the city, she believes. “Technology for technology’s sake is not going to help with resource scarcity,” says Bulkeley. “Resource scarcity and resource security are going to become increasingly important.”

Bulkeley also says that this twin-track approach between hi-tech solutions and low-tech initiatives is creating “a new economic space.”

Things that we have never thought of as resources before are gaining value. Bulkeley predicts roofs could be rented out for hydroponic gardens or used as rainwater collection points. Some investors have leased rooftop solar energy panels, selling electricity on to power companies.

And if sustainable cities have to think vertically, they will also have to dig down as well. Boris Johnson has announced plans for a £30billion orbital tunnel circling the metropolis.

As the volume of goods ordered online increases, it may be the case that this orbital tunnel is restricted to vans and lorries.

Railways will also become much more efficient, thanks to 21st-century signalling.

Rather than the Victorian idea of everybody disembarking at a central London terminus, trains will instead circle the metropolis.

Of course, excavating an orbital ring road and connecting London’s railway stations will mean years of building site miser y for Londoners. Professor David Begg, a former government transport adviser, says that everybody likes the idea of economic improvement, but they are not prepared to put up with the upheaval that goes with it…

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With traffic disruption set to hit historic peaks, driverless cars are being pushed by many tech firms as the next big urban transport solution

By Tim Adler

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MAGINE a 22-mile circular tunnel beneath London bumper-to-bumper with driverless electric cars. That’s the vision of London mayor Boris Johnson for what the capital might look like in 2030.

Last December Transport for London (TfL) awarded the contract for running London’s electric vehicle (EV) scheme to IER, the French company that runs Paris’s own EV initiative.

Autolib – the French capital’s electric car rental service – currently has 155,000 subscribers making around 10,000 rentals each day.

The plan is to have 3,000 electric cars in London in the automotive equivalent of the “Boris Bike” scheme. Most of the EVs will be above ground, hailed through your smartphone.

But some will be underground, shuttling around the metropolis in an “Inner Orbital Tunnel.” This £30billion grand project will span Highbury in north London, Hackney in east London, drop down to Battersea and reemerge in Hammersmith.

“We will be able to squeeze many more though a tunnel. We have to be much more efficient using space when it comes to moving people,” said traffic expert Professor David Begg.

The tunnel was part of a £200 billion wish-list for transport infrastructure unveiled by Johnson last month. Johnson has also called for an orbital railway around London, stretching from Walthamstow in the north to Sutton in the south.

Traffic should flow more smoothly as GPS will

keep EVs the right distance apart, avoiding the bunching effect that causes traffic jams.

It is unlikely the Inner Orbital will ever happen, but TfL needs to do something – congestion is set to rise by 60 per cent by 2031 without any action. According to Professor Begg, a former government transport advisor, vehicles are only ever full for 4 per cent of their lifetime, while cars in the metropolis only carry 1.2 passengers each as they choke roads.

How people get around cities is going to be the next vertical that the internet is going to disrupt, says Anthony Townsend, senior research scientist at the Rudin Center for Transportation in New York. Transportation will be as changed by the internet as bookselling or over-the-counter banking, he predicts.

Above ground, driverless cars could circle around looking for passengers. Buses could collect and drop off passengers where they want to go, rather than run along fixed routes.

All this could herald, says Townsend, a golden age of transportation, an opportunity to completely rethink how public transit works.

But others are more cautious. Tim Edwards, a senior engineer at Mira, an automotive eng i neer i ng con su lt a nc y deve lopi ng driverless cars in the UK, foresees evolution, not revolution.

Already some car functions such as braking systems are automated. More will follow, such as automatic parallel parking or hands-free driving when you’re sitting in a traffic jam.

Edwards predicts that airport shuttles and campus buses will be among the first fully driverless vehicles.

The engineer dismisses the argument that driverless technology will take the fun out of driving, however. “None of us sitting in traffic jams find driving exciting,” he says.

London is not the only English city looking to driverless cars to ease traffic congestion. Milton Keynes is planning the most advanced driverless transport scheme in the UK. Passengers will book two-passenger pods through their smartphone, which will then ferry them around the city centre like a modern-day rickshaw.

Coventry-based RDM Group is building three prototype pods in partnership with Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group and project

Google’s driverless cars have been on US roads since 2012

managers Transport Systems Catapult. Test trials begin next year.

The first computer-controlled cars will start appearing on British roads in January 2015.

Three cities will be selected as testing grounds for trials lasting up to three years. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Department for Transport are asking cities to compete for a share of a £10million grant. Southampton City Council is one city already putting a bid together, Business Reporter can reveal.

The driverless car will just be the first phase.

Second-generation cars will communicate directly

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Motoring ahead Five UK companies developing driverless tech Business Reporter profiles five UK-based companies that are developing technology for the fast-evolving world of driverless cars. The government recently announced a £10m competition to run pilot schemes in three cities next year. Driverless cars could be on the road by early as February.

autonomous cars. “Handling that is going to be tricky,” he said.

Autocat One Stroud-based Autocat One is developing a camera that would enable driverless cars to see much further in bad driving conditions than humans. The firm is in talks with backers over its “unique vision-enhancement” system, which would work by connecting the camera to the on-board control system.

“My interest is regarding the safety of driverless and driverassist systems in poor visibility,” says founder Sid Wells. “Fog and spray evident on motorways from even a light rain causes issues for all drivers – how will the driverless car of the future cope with this?”

Observant Innovations Based in the University of Southampton Science Park, Observant is developing a 360-degree camera that could be mounted on a driverless car. Originally developed for the emergency services, an all-seeing camera would record everything the driverless car passes. This would be especially helpful for insurance purposes if cars are involved in accidents.

Observant is also working on a mesh of cameras placed around cities as part of a sensor system. “A mesh of our cameras would keep track of anything that moves, which would be a great help for transport and security,” says chairman John Scholes.

“We’re most interested in hooking up with other companies that are working in this field. We can be the eyes of the system, but we’re looking for the brain.”

Microlise Nottingham’s Microlise already supplies black boxes that monitor vehicle diagnostics for truck manufacturers DAF and Man. Its boxes are installed in lorry fleets of companies such as Carlsberg, DHL and Tesco.

Driverless cars reporting back on their roadworthiness will be crucial when nobody is behind the wheel.

Nadeem Raza, CEO of Microlise, warns of a difficult transition when regular drivers will be pulling up alongside

Omnisense Cambridge-based Omnisense is developing a positioning system that will orient a driverless car in relation to hundreds of objects. This will be key if driverless cars are to steer between pedestrians, street furniture and other vehicles. Omnisense specialises in “cluster relative positioning” that locates the position of devices based on the time it takes for a signal

with the traffic system, enabling much smoother driving and even more economic fuel consumption. If you are approaching a traffic light, said Edwards, the EV will adjust its speed to go through the moment the light is changing.

“Connected driving will ease traffic congestion and conserve fuel even more,” said Edwards.

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OWEVER, the UK is a long way behind the US when it comes to driverless car technology. Google’s own driverless car has clocked up more than 700,000 hours on the roads of California without an accident.

Car manufacturers have leapt on the bandwagon. It may be that in hailing the driverless car of the future, C-suite executives will still want to flag down a Mercedes or a BMW as befits their status.

Volvo plans to be first out of the gate, pledging to have self-driving cars for sale by 2017. Carlos Ghosn, Nissan’s chief executive, intends to have his company’s first driverless vehicle on the market three years later. GM has said the same thing. Jaguar Land Rover reckons it will launch its own fully autonomous vehicle within 10 years.

Mercedes-Benz, Audi and BMW are also developing driverless cars.

Tom Vanderbilt, author of the bestselling book Traffic, has been for a test drive in a Google

to ping between them.

Andy Thurman, CEO of Omnisense, describes his sensor technology as the “building blocks of the driverless cars of the future. Our digital ‘time of arrival’ technology will be a core part of a solution.” Omnisense’s sensors are being trialled at a mine in Australia.

RDM Automotive Coventry-based RDM Group is building three prototype driverless pods for a trial scheme in Milton Keynes.

RDM is developing the pods in partnership with Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group and project managers Transport Systems Catapult.

Test trials begin next year. The pods will have 360-degree radar, cameras, GPS tracking, telematics and proximity sensors.

So confident is RDM about the future of driverless technology that it predicts it will be turning over £25m by 2020 compared with £8m turnover today.

A conceptual illustration of RDM’s driverless pod

car. “I was struck by how quickly I began to feel comfortable, and how erratic the behaviour of other drivers was – which I was now free to casually observe,” he wrote.

Townsend believes US politicians have abnegated responsibility for traffic policy, however, leaving it the hands of corporate America. “It’s a tremendous opportunity to make cities cleaner, greener and more fun,” he says.

“But at the same time we’re ceding the future to the private sector.”

A lack of political leadership has opened the door for tech visionaries to come in, says Townsend. Companies such as Google want to extend the operating system they’ve created for the internet into the physical world, he warns.

“Why are we letting technology corporations reinvent a system that we know is fundamentally broken? I would like to see Google focusing on the bus of the future or the railway of the future, not the private car. It’s almost as if we are using the tech sector to address all of the problems we as a society have failed to address over the last 50 years.” Gartner, the tech analysts, also poured cold water on the buzz around driverless cars last month, describing the technology as “over-hyped”.

Sustainable cities

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Solar power hits the road

By Tim Adler ON THE face of it, it’s such an obvious idea you wonder why nobody has thought of it before – resurfacing roads with solar panels to solve the planet’s energy problem.

Scott Brusaw, an inventor in Spokane, Idaho, has so far raised $2million through crowdfunding site Indiegogo, while the US government has donated $850,000 in seed funding. A YouTube video extolling the concept has had more than 17 million views.

Critics argue the technology is too fragile and would cost billions. It would also require vast infrastructure running alongside the roads to redistribute power. But for now Brusaw and his wife are experimenting with a small parking lot. Vehicles have driven over it without harming any of the 108 panels.

These panels could also be configured to give traffic warnings through LED lights and melt away snow and ice. Italy, England and the US are also experimenting with technology to improve traffic flow and ease congestion, while Deutsche Telekom is piloting a scheme for remote management of parking spaces in Pisa, Italy. Thomas Kiessling, chief product and innovation officer at Deutsche Telekom, said the technology will help cities reduce C02 emissions while improving people’s lives.

Meanwhile in the UK, a 50-mile stretch of the A14 between Felixstowe and Rugby is being equipped with sensors that will send signals to and from mobile phones. BT, the Department for Transport and Cambridgebased tech firm Neul are collaborating on the project. In its first phase, drivers will receive speed restriction messages by mobile phone.

Communications regulator Ofcom envisions such smart roads being connected to a centrally controlled traffic system that could impose speeds on cars to encourage smoother

A conceptual illustration of what Brusaw’s “solar roads” would look like; above right: Scott and Julie Brusaw with their prototype

traffic flow. On-board computers could override the driver, imposing maximum speeds on the vehicle by controlling the brakes and the engine.

“Sensors in cars and on the roads monitor the build-up of congestions and wirelessly send this information to a central traffic control system,” Ofcom said. “This system could also communicate directly with cars, directing them along diverted routes to avoid the congestion and even managing their speed.”

Critics of this kind of technology say it is vulnerable to criminal attack. A terrorist could immobilise a city by feeding fake data to the system – turning all traffic lights to red, for example. Last month Cesar Cerrudo, chief technology officer at US cybersecurity firm IOActive, told delegates at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas that he had breached traffic control sensors already running in US cities – around 200,000 sensors below roadways and on poles in cities including New York and Washington, that detect vehicles and dictate the timing of traffic lights.

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The big interview Zaha Hadid

All buildings will contribute to a sustainable society The celebrated architect, whose buildings grace Abu Dhabi, Seoul and Guangzhou, predicts the shape-changing structures of the future WHAT ARE the most important factors when planning sustainable cities?

I think the solution lies in the convergence of many areas of research. Like many architects, we already implement sophisticated ventilation and building management systems in our projects to improve the ecological balance of a building – however, we are also researching new materials and construction methods that also bring significant environmental benefits. And 3D printing is beginning to enter the industry, The London Aquatics Centre, designed by Zaha Hadid for the 2012 Olympics

offering the potential to reduce energy consumption while increasing the diversity of our built environment.

How will everyday life in 2045 have changed from today?

Contemporary society is not standing still, and its buildings must evolve with new patterns of life to meet the needs of its users. I believe what is new in our generation are the much greater levels of social complexity and connectivity.

With more than 50 per cent of the world’s growing population now living in cities, contemporary urbanism and architecture must move beyond t h e a r c h it e c t u r e o f r e p e t it i o n a n d compartmentalisation. The separation that defined buildings of the last century has been superseded by buildings that engage, integrate and adapt.

Construction methods and materials yet to be developed, such as sophisticated architectural skins that can be twisted, stretched, bent and folded in whichever way imaginable, will happen.

These materials will be transparent or opaque, structurally self-supporting and take any surface quality or colour one can think of. Individual buildings will communicate with and connect to the next, creating a continually changing field of separate buildings that are highly connected [and that] will contribute to a sustainable society.

London seems to see a new luxury development thrown up each month, then bought by overseas investors. Is this really sustainable living?

Building these walled cities within the city, like mini-Kremlins, is a step backwards. I think that there has to be some sort of reaction to this, because these isolated, gated communities are a very archaic way of living.

There’s enough total wealth today that all people should have a good home, not just the extremely rich. Having a home is a crucial issue

Hadid’s Galaxy SOHO shopping centre, Beijing

– not only in terms of a shelter and the basics – but also for well-being, for a better life.

What should city planners remember when building the city of the future?

Hybridisation [multi-use] buildings have become very interesting. There needs to be a major shift away from zoning – you live here, work there and play somewhere else – but layering all these uses together in the same zone totally changes the way we look at cities.

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Sustainable cities

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Print my house!

In the future, our houses may be printed from plastic not built out of bricks.

Tim Adler reports on a new form of architecture

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UTURE cities may be printed rather than built, predicts Amsterdam-based architecture firm DUS Architects.

Buildings could be squeezed layer-by-layer out of industrial 3D printers, enabling architects to build whatever they want. DUS argues that with 3D printing, there is no waste, reduced transportation costs and houses could be melted down and recycled. It could revolutionise the way we build our cities.

The technology could offer affordable housing to replace slums or in disaster areas. DUS is already building an experimental 3D house on a small canal-side plot in the north of the city.

The firm will spend the next three years extruding the traditional-looking Dutch canal house, layer-by-layer, as a demonstration of what 3D printing technology could achieve.

President Obama was shown the technology when he visited Amsterdam in March. However, the technology isn’t quite there yet. The 3D printed canal house has spots where its walls resemble nothing so much as squidged spaghetti. Yet the project is also being used to test how 3D designs can be crowd-shaped and modified via the internet.

Hans Vermeulen, a partner at DUS Architects, says the project celebrates the possibilities of digital fabrication for the building industry. Co-founder Hedwig Heinsman adds: “We hope that in three years’ time, the house has developed into a mature 3D-printed building with different rooms, each with different constructions and material properties that all tell something about the time that they were printed.”

The future is often portrayed as teeming high-rises, huge advertisements and shuffling hordes. Robert Dalziel, a

London-based architect, visited nine cities including Tokyo, Shanghai and Mexico City, to understand what people really liked about urban living. He came to a different conclusion: the future would be about low-rise, agreeably pre-fabricated buildings. “Everybody loved low-rise, high-density buildings in each of the cities we visited, not tower blocks,” says Dalziel.

Dalziel says he developed his ideas partly as a reaction to the glut of high-rise construction going on in London.

Commercial developers have not been building high-density, low-rise buildings in the capital, he says. Instead, they are throwing up high-rise luxury tower blocks aimed at foreign investors buying “off plan” – buying solely as a rental investment or capital asset.

“These tower blocks that are being thrown up are just boxes to live in,” says Dalziel. “Property developers just think about a commercial return as opposed to what makes a city attractive.”

The architect points to Georgian terraces in England, with their tall windows and high ceilings, as an example of beloved 19th-century urban living. They are still in demand. The repetition of architectural features such as windows and doors only adds to their charm. These were sustainable buildings because hundreds of years on, they can still be adapted to become shops, and converted back to residential use.

The ability to change rooms around is crucial to Dalziel’s vision. His state-of-the-art buildings have moveable walls so they can be reconfigured. To do this, Dalziel uses pre-fabricated elements that are slotted together. He is convinced that off-site manufacturing results in a much higher build quality compared to cost. There are also economies of scale. Dalziel and his team are building 150 sustainable flats and houses in west London using their patented building technique involving ready-made panels.

Above: concept art for Ceylon Road, west London, where the Rational House initiative is about to go into development; Below left: what the 3D house DUS Architects is printing will eventually look like

Work begins this autumn.

Of course, Britain has used pre-fabricated building before: after the Second World War, the UK tried to meet the housing shortage by building nearly 160,000 “prefab” homes. These were made out of cheaper materials such as tin and asbestos and the then cutting-edge precast concrete.

Although we sneer at prefab bungalows now, for a postwar England used to an outside lavatory and tin bath, prefabs had bathrooms inside, while kitchens featured such luxuries as a built-in oven, refrigerator and constant hot water – things we take for granted today.

Hammersmith and Fulham Council commissioned Dalziel to build a prototype house in 2012. The finished building was so impressive that five other councils have now commissioned pilot schemes.

Prices per square foot vary from site to site. However, Dalziel says that his prefabricated housing costs as little as £170 per square foot compared to £300 per square foot for the latest luxury high-rise.

In Germany, the pre-constructed or “modular” Huf Haus is achingly modern and desirable. These flat-pack dwellings arrive by truck and can be erected in as little as a week. Huf Haus points out that precision-made parts means a much higher degree of finish, without any of the mud and improvisation that you get onsite.

The striking buildings are becoming increasingly popular in Britain too. UK building experts say that it would cost around £300 per square foot to build a comparable house onsite, compared to the £220 Huf Haus charges.

More than 200 Huf Haus have been built in the UK, including a development in Dulwich, London. They are also built to a zero-carbon standard. “The beauty of a premanufactured product is a fixed price, whereas there are lots of unknowns with bricks-and-mortar,” says Huf Haus.

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Cities in the sand

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Above and below left: conceptual illustrations of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi

The finiancial crash heralded the doom of many an ambitious eco-city project – but the lessons learnt from their failure are proving more than valuable

By Tim Adler

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HE WORLD’S first zero-emission, fully sustainable city was how Masdar was promoted to the world when Abu Dhabi first announced the $22billion project back in 2006. Architects Foster + Partners drew up beautiful concept art. Masdar City would float on a raised platform, beneath which electric cars would ferry passengers; the six-kilometresquare site would house 50,000 residents and support 1,500 new green businesses. Another 60,000 workers were expected to commute to Masdar daily, employed by the green technology companies that were going to sprout up.

Abu Dhabi, which is aware that its oil reserves are expected to run out within 100 years, knows that it needs to have other industries to replace petroleum. The idea was that Masdar would be to Abu Dhabi what the Nasa space programme was to America – a crucible for future eco-friendly technology. “The support of the Abu Dhabi government was incredibly important,” Gerard Evenden, senior partner and design director at Foster + Partners, tells Business Reporter. “There was a true commitment to trying to do something that the single in a joined-up way.”

The Abu Dhabi population was also receptive.

They knew what it was like to live in a country where water was scarce and the temperature

can hit 52°C in the summer. So Foster + Partners set about designing an eco-friendly city based on Arabic architecture that had shielded the local population from the pitiless sun for hundreds of years. Evenden says: “Sustainability is not just about today but it’s the future in terms of taking Abu Dhabi forward. The aim of the project was to build a development that was more sustainable and more energy efficient.

“It was much more than saying, let’s build an eco-city. This was a more serious project asking questions about the future of sustainable living, and what could be done in terms of spin-off technology. The idea of Masdar was to look at the science behind these things.”

But there is a gulf between the concept art and the city that was actually built. When the worldwide recession hit in 2008, Abu Dhabi was forced to bail out neighbouring Dubai. The (remote-controlled) lights were quietly switched off one-by-one on Masdar City.

Masdar today is just half a dozen streets and a university. Around 1,000 people live there, mostly working or studying at the Masdar Institute, a postgraduate university developing green technology.

Evenden says that the downturn did not influence his planning of the city. “By the point of the slowdown we had already finalised the masterplan.” The 100-square-metre Masdar Institute followed Foster + Partner’s blueprint to the letter. The rest of the city may have a looser

approach to zero-emission living. Evenden accepts that the rest of Masdar will change as the city evolves.

Masdar is not the only futuristic eco-city that has run into the sand. China’s own eco-city, Caofeidian – which started construction in 2003 – is 200km southeast of Beijing. Construction was financed through huge bank loans that were called in halfway through building. The rising cost of materials and lack of government support also left Caofeidian stranded. The city was planned to accommodate one million inhabitants – yet only a few thousand live there today.

Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city is another stalled venture. This £24billion development

China’s huge Caofeidian development is now a largely deserted ghost city

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Why sustainability is good business

– a joint project between China and Singapore – was trumpeted as a “model for sustainable investment” when work first began in 2008.

Today, Tianjin only has 6,000 inhabitants compared to the 350,000 planned. There are no hospitals or shopping plazas and what shops there are are mostly closed. The roads lead nowhere.

Caofeidian and Tianjin have joined the growing ranks of China’s ghost cities. However, it may be that the lasting achievements of Masdar and Tianjin are what they did not do, rather than what was achieved. In building these cities, engineers understand what green technology works as opposed to more fanciful solutions.

Says Evenden: “The work we did at Masdar has

had major benefits. For me, there have been hugely positive spin-offs that people didn’t expect at first.”

For example, Masdar originally planned to have solar panels on the roof of each building.

Planners realised that it was much more efficient to spread the city’s 88,000 solar panels beside the conurbation. Rather than clambering up hundreds of ladders, engineers could clean and repair solar panels lying flat in the desert. These solar panels now supply up to 30 per cent of Masdar’s energy.

Another aspect of Foster + Partners’ thinking was to give people choice. It was left up to residents whether they wanted to open shutters or close blinds. Evenden says that this giving people choice resulted in a way of living that’s more energy friendly.

But for Evenden, Masdar ’s biggest contribution has been to set what it calls “estidama” in stone – any new building project in the Emirates must have sustainability at its core. Estidama became law two years ago.

“Estidama was a direct result of people looking at Masdar and what we were trying to achieve,” says Evenden.

And the Chinese have also learnt valuable lessons from the Tianjin experiment. SinoSingapore Tianjin Eco-city has been a laboratory for solving some of China’s enormous problems: permanent traffic gridlock, drought and astronomical electricity bills. For example, the rivers around Tianjin were so polluted with heavy metals they had to be cleaned with specially developed technology. Given that 70 per cent of China’s rivers are too polluted to provide drinking water, this technology developed for Tianjin has huge internal potential.

PASCAL Mittermaier, head of sustainability for Lend Lease, the Australian property developer, believes that thinking green equals good business.

Lend Lease has already pioneered sustainable urban developments in New York, Chicago, Melbourne and Singapore, and Mittermaier, who manages the £1.5billon urban renewal of the Elephant & Castle district in south London, thinks the firm’s proven commitment to sustainability over the years swung it the contract. “Developers that can prove their green credentials will get more of these big sustainable contracts,” he says.

The Elephant & Castle development is the most sustainable urban regeneration project being built in Britain. This regeneration will create 2,500 homes over the next 15 years.

New homes will be up to 30 per cent more energy efficient than current regulations require. They will use one third less water than the average London household. Green energy will be produced onsite through a combined heat and energy hub. The plant will use a combination of bio-methane and regular natural gas, providing heat and power to all 2,800 homes and shops. The CHP plant will also be connected to homes and shops in the surrounding area. The homes themselves will be built using a sustainable wood alternative that can reduce a building’s energy needs by up to 40 per cent.

Even more crucially, Lend Lease will create London’s largest new park in 70 years, planting 1,200 new plane trees. A major feature of the park will be its water attenuation ability – basically, collecting rainwater. Seven air quality filters will be installed, monitoring the park’s contribution to clean air.

Mittermaier enthuses that the park will become a green, beating heart of south London – differentiating itself from other soulless high-rise developments, built to encourage overseas buyers purchasing luxury flats sight unseen. Mittermaier says: “Many developers just put up tower blocks and aren’t engaged with solving problems. Developers try to

offload their risk by selling luxury flats ‘off plan’ but the deal we negotiated with Southwark Council was for 25 per cent of housing to be affordable.

“I think this is an opportunity to develop something that’s not only profit-for-profit’s sake. The definition of sustainability is if you can find winning outcomes for people, planet and profit.”

Once completed the Elephant & Castle development will create 1,000 new jobs locally, while a further 5,000 jobs will be created during construction. Like other inner London councils, Southwark plans to choke off private car use by having 25 per cent fewer car parking spaces than required. People will be nudged into using public transport or going by bike – every home will have at least one bicycle storage rack. There will also be charge points for electric vehicles.

The Elephant & Castle regeneration has the backing of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative. The mayors of the world’s 40 biggest cities have joined together to share best practice on green issues. The Elephant & Castle regeneration is one of the first such projects to achieve participant status.

Elephant & Castle was once so glamorous it was known as the Piccadilly Circus of south London, until severe damage during the war led to its redevelopment. The massive Heygate council estate was built in 1974 – designed in the “Brutalist” fashion of the time, it housed more than 3,000 people. However it became notorious for its poverty, drugs and crime and is now being demolished.

Two developments have already begun on the perimeter of the former Heygate: One the Elephant will have 284 houses, while the low-rise Trafalgar Place development (above) will have 235 homes.

South Gardens, the third development, breaks ground in October.

Lend Lease plans to launch one new phase each year over the coming 10 to 15 years.

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Has cheap electricity really arrived for all commercial enterprise?

There’s funding available for commercial solar, and now is the time to get it, says Don Lord of UK Sustainable Energy INDUSTRY VIEW

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he UK is now the fifth largest utility-scale solar market, rising above Spain with 5GW (5,000,000 kW) of installed capacity.

It’s an impressive figure, but still some way behind Germany, which has 36GW and which, on June 9, achieved the honour of generating over 50 per cent of the nation’s electricity from solar.

Even the most pessimistic would acknowledge that solar is quiet, has no moving parts and emits no carbon – and with 87 per cent of MP’s polling in favour of solar, it’s reasonable to expect that our 5GW

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of installed capacity will continue to rise quickly.

Private wire The good news is that the route to an increased deployment is unlikely to come from a proliferation of solar farms in the leafy greenbelt, as reduced grid capacity and a more stringent planning policy are both playing their part. Instead, much of

the deployment will come from simple direct connections via a private wire from roof- or ground-mounted panels, delivering high-energy-use customers with power directly and efficiently.

Private wire schemes have been very popular with big business such as Toyota and Sainsbury’s, who are generating significant portions of their power requirements with multi-megawatt solar installations that reduce energy expenditure and help them to meet carbon reduction targets. In addition with the national grid creaking under the strain and nuclear power coming online well after many gas-fired power stations have been decommissioned, this distributed generation suits the energy mix perfectly.

The bonus, however, is for those small, medium or large businesses which have roof space or are located with a mile or so of available land and who are mindful about parting with capital for non-core business activities. Investors are currently keen to direct funds into commercial and

industrial solar and have moderate return expectations from private wire installations via Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) of around 8p/kWh on installations sizes as low as 250kW (peak output).

Significant savings While rooftop works do bring a measure of short-term disruption, the benefits can be compelling.

These investments can see businesses benefiting from multi-million pound installations without contributing a penny towards the capital costs and returning circa 40 per cent savings on the cost of electricity. Most PPAs charge only for the power used and include comprehensive maintenance and decommissioning obligations as well as taking on board all planning risk and cost.

Let’s be honest here – companies such as ours do have a vested interest, but with large amounts of investment funding available and low-cost power purchase agreements, it does appear that the sun is shining on commercial enterprise again. www.uk-se.com

Hanadu is the technology choice for smart buildings in sustainable cities INDUSTRY VIEW

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ustainability in cities is now a real possibility, thanks to technology advances across a wide front in sensing and communications. Innovative combinations of these give rise to compelling solutions, including energy management, smart metering, water management and traffic optimisation.

All these sensors need to connect to something in order to be of use. That might be another sensor, a connection to the internet, another device within the same building or an interactive device to engage with a user. Increasingly, in deployment, it is being realised that such “machine-to-machine” communications need more than just a regular internet connection. In particular, the assumption that one of the standard technologies (such as Wi-Fi or ZigBee) will suffice is no longer accepted.

Hanadu has been specifically designed to provide machine-tomachine communications within the context of a sustainable city. It is the vital

missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle of connectivity solutions that span the urban environment. Inside a home, it provides reliable loft-to-garage connections. In an office, with its myriad of enterprise technologies, it just works.

Energy management applications require devices and appliances that can be monitored and controlled from a distance, at a price point that is not prohibitive for low-cost equipment.

Hanadu achieves precisely this outcome for offerings such as smart thermostats, heating controls and intelligent lighting. It also connects other building automation products such as smoke alarms and intruder detection systems.

Smart meter roll-outs present major technology challenges, with tens of millions of homes needing to get onto a dedicated data network. There can never be a one-size-fits-all approach and the initial solution has been found wanting in up to 30 per cent of UK homes.

Hanadu’s design allows it to service all of that 30 per cent completely seamlessly so that utilities can deploy a single solution that does not worry about the precise

mixture of technologies.

Demand-side reduction in a residential context requires a high number of dwellings to respond in sync: turning off a single fridge makes no difference to the grid, but suspending 10,000 units at once can put a meaningful dent in the network load. Low-price, ubiquitous connectivity, such as Hanadu, delivers this.

Solar generation also depends on such connectivity. Usage within the home can only be synced with local microgeneration activity if it knows about it. Further, the control circuits for microgeneration need to work irrespective of the specific layout of an individual building – rather than deploy scarce engineering talent, a solution that works everywhere is so much better.

Hanadu is a solution for a whole range of technical challenges in the sustainable urban environment. It also has use in many other digital applications as part of the wider Internet of Things. What is good for a sustainable city is also good for a digital city with its Big Data challenges.

Hanadu has been created by the high technology industry to make sure that the promise of urban sustainability can be fully delivered. It is backed by leading blue-chip technology innovators with a global presence. It is also supported and endorsed by DECC as a key component of the sustainable future.

Russell Haggar is chair of Hanadu SIG www.hanadu.org

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Data: the building blocks of digital cities Experts say data will dictate the success of tomorrow’s cities – so we need to make sure we use it properly

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ATA represents the building material of digital cities. New markets will develop as digital cities take hold, just as importers and other services sprang up around ports during the industrial age.

These digital cities – where technology helps city dwellers conserve energy, water and other utilities – will use millions of sensors to monitor everything. Sensors will control vehicles, buildings, thermostats, streetlights, traffic signals and even vending machines. Sensors will be used in a preventative way too, monitoring for when infrastructure is likely to fail. Railway lines, roads, tunnels, public buildings and power plants will be fitted with networked sensors, all the while anticipating impending failure.

“Predicting something is going to happen is going to have an enormous impact for cities going forward,” says Laurie Miles (right), head of analytics at data company SAS. “You’re not in a reactive mode.” SAS, whose clients include HMRC, HSBC and Visa, calls the technology “predictive maintenance.” In the future, tiny drones like dragonflies could dart around the city, filming problems and relaying them back to control rooms.

The change is already happening. Energy companies in the UK use household sensors to monitor usage, taking readings on home gas and electricity consumption every 15 minutes. Transport for London is understood to have sensors predicting when its machinery will fail, and New York’s DataBridge programme funnels a vast amount of data into a single analytics platform, enabling planners to make much more informed choices about where to use resources. Buildings that need to be refurbished or demolished, for example – the number of buildings deemed

unliveable has increased fivefold since DataBridge came online.

Other forward-thinking cities such as Amsterdam, San Francisco and Singapore have appointed chief technology or information officers to help drive this change. Indeed, Cisco recently signed an agreement with the city of Amsterdam “to foster smarter and greener innovation” by working to shape a city as an “Internet of Everything lighthouse city” – one of Cisco’s showcase metropolises.

Amsterdam has declared a goal of becoming one of the world’s most sustainable cities by 2040. Archana Amaranth, programme manager, visionary innovation research group at consultants Frost & Sullivan, says that sustainable cities and smart cities both want the same thing: managing resources more efficiently – except that one does it through conservation and the other through technology.

There is a lot of money at stake. Smart city communications networks alone are predicted to become a $3.5billion market by 2020, according to Navigant Research. Overall, Frost & Sullivan predicts that the smart city economy – from sensors to intelligent farming to traffic management – will be worth $1.5trillion by 2020. This creates a huge opportunity for suppliers to make money out of the huge array of technologies and services needed to create a truly sustainable city: the sensors, networks, apps, dashboards, data standards, security, data and analytics.

Sceptics, however, point to the potentially catastrophic consequences if a hacker locked a city down, switching off lights and traffic control systems. Amaranth believes the biggest business opportunity in

the smart city of the future will be for tech companies to build bigger and stronger firewalls. “[Data protection] is a threat but also an opportunity,” she says. Frost & Sullivan has identified four categories of supplier to smart cities: fully-integrated, citywide systems; a network service provider, such as Cisco; individual product vendors such as sensor manufacturers; and a service manager, such as Accenture, to monitor buildings, lighting and traffic signals. How technology is procured will vary from city to city. The Chinese government has a list of preferred suppliers, whereas Amsterdam has gone for a collaborative approach where anybody can pitch for contracts.

However, there is a question as to whether servers will be able to cope with the vast amount of data cities are spewing out in what has been called “the data exhaust”. If cities do not invest in data centre infrastructure, there is a danger that metropolises could suffer outages just as poorer countries have electricity blackouts. And won’t people object to having every movement monitored and watched? Surely there are privacy issues if everybody is tracked for every minute of the day. Laurie Miles thinks not. “A lot of this data wouldn’t be personal data, it will be anonymised,” he says.

The data that cities produce will become valuable as well.

“People are starting to think about data monetisation,” says Miles. “We may reach a point where they sell their data to the highest bidder.” Anonymous data has a value as well.

For example, banks may relocate branches based on footfall in city centres. Or insurance companies will raise premiums if you regularly commute through accident black spots.

Miles’s worry is that Britain won’t have enough data analysts to cope with this belching smokestack of information. He worries that universities will not supply enough mathematicians and data-literate graduates to cope with the sheer volume of data processing. “It’s like the Wright Brothers inventing the plane, and then not having anybody to fly it,” he says.

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High expectations How will we shape future cities – and how will they shape us? Skanska UK CEO Mike Putnam considers a brave new world where people and pragmatism address some of our greatest challenges INDUSTRY VIEW

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Mike Putnam

hinking about future cities is complex. In addition to the life-changing challenges and opportunities they pose, the timescales mean that we’ll be tackling those things within our lifetimes, so they are very real.

Most of us live in cities or urban areas, and the number is growing – to 75 per cent of the world’s population by 2050, suggests the UK Green Building Council.

With the majority of human activity in cities, they are the source of much of our technological development and innovation, as well as social interaction and inspiration. So we have a lot to thank our cities and urban areas for, and a high level of expectation.

The list of challenges is a familiar one: an ageing population and increased demand for energy, water and natural resources – scarcity in some instances – and a changing political landscape for regions and cities.

My firm belief is that the solutions we find will not be slightly different versions of what we are doing now. Just as we had different aspirations to those of our parents and grandparents, the young people who will populate these future cities have a different outlook on life.

Most UK college students would rather have internet connectivity than ownership of a car – but that doesn’t mean they don’t need access to a good, integrated transport network, which could also include access to a car. That car might be a driverless car (or bus), funded through crowd sourcing and navigating using “big data”, gathered every few minutes

Green is the only colour Future cities will only be one colour – and that’s green, says Paul Chandler (below), executive vice president, Skanska UK. “A construction project doesn’t end when we hand over the keys – our reputation rests on its success once people are using it. You can build a green building, but it’s the people who interact with it who ensure it stays green, in terms of energy performance,” he says.

“We spend time talking to the users of buildings about what they want from their working environment – physically, socially and economically. We’ve introduced new ways of thinking in building management but also looked at people’s behaviour – from turning out the lights to reducing waste to landfill – to give demonstrable savings and greener building performance.”

at points around the city. And the car might be taking them to their 10th or 20th new job, perhaps in a new city altogether.

In that new city, they might be living in high-quality accommodation that’s home for a short time, because they know they will be moving on in a year or two – and so does their employer, which provided the accommodation because it wants to attract the best resources as and when it needs them.

Some of it sounds a little futuristic, but much of what I’ve just described is already happening. Some employers do have living spaces for employees they need to move around the world. Younger generations of workers do expect to move jobs around 30 times in their lifetime.

They also expect to get connected wherever they are, so they can go where the work is, in person or remotely.

Developers are talking about how we will soon be able to operate our home

appliances remotely via the internet of things, and there are already prototypes of driverless cars. That’s a far cry from a job for life, a family saloon and 2.4 children in the suburbs – albeit a slightly outdated model for life.

That said, we shouldn’t expect to be living in some kind of Blade Runner set in years to come. Some 80 per cent of the buildings standing today will still be in use in 2050. For a construction company such as Skanska, this creates lots of interesting opportunities for infrastructure and retrofit business streams, developing new capabilities and innovations to help our cities run more efficiently, using less energy, water and resources, but also build in flexibility and limit waste.

A building with zero net-energy usage – that is to say, buildings that are self-sufficient for energy and water (so no energy bills) – might seem like a pipe dream, but construction firms have already built successful examples.

This is the future for new construction projects, we believe.

Alongside that, expertise in adapting older buildings to be greener, more efficient and flexible, and – above all – more attractive and productive places to live and work, will be essential. Just as

we “reduce, reuse and recycle” at home, we should use these principles when building or renewing the urban environment, from first foundations right through to how people use and occupy those buildings. There is growing evidence of the well-being benefits of well designed, green buildings. The same approach will also apply to local areas and communities within cities, also taking into account climate change adaptation.

As a leading green company, we’re comfortable talking about the triple bottom line – the economic, environmental and social factors that influence success. Forward-looking businesses don’t just focus on profit, and neither should future cities. Back to that complex picture – each of our cities and major towns has different needs and motivations, with no one size that fits all in terms of developing future cities.

In the end, it’s about understanding how the whole is affected by the actions of the few, and being brave when you need to.

Successful future cities will support local economies, improve living standards and cut waste to cut cost, of course, but most of all they will have to put people first. @skanskaukplc www.skanska.co.uk

Working together Two’s company, three’s a crowd source, considers Jennifer Clark (below right), environment director at Skanska UK. “These days, collaboration is the buzzword in construction – and it should be in future cities too,” she says.

“To make a building a success, we like to bring together the people involved in its development and use. That means the patients and clinicians in a hospital, for example, or the teachers and pupils in a school. It’s also a great opportunity to help them understand more about what they can do – as individuals and as a group – to improve the performance of their building.

“Greener buildings are better for people and there’s research to back it up. Greener schools are improving pupil performance, and greener office buildings are reducing absenteeism with a healthier working environment.”

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Sustainable cities

Like us: www.facebook.com/biznessreporter | Contact us at info@lyonsdown.co.uk | Lyonsdown is a member of the PPA

Inspector Dogberry Imagine skyscrapers

Renewables will account for two thirds of the $7.7trillion that will be invested in energy in 2030, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This will help

could be used on deep space

Melchiorri imagines spreading his

covered with artificial leaves

missions; one of the problems

leaves on the side of buildings,

sucking in carbon dioxide and

with long-haul spaceflight is

which he says could increase

filling urban spaces with more

astronauts slowly poisoning

oxygenated air for city dwellers.

fresh air. That’s the vision

themselves with CO2. Walls

Dr Wim Vermass of Arizona

of Julian Melchiorri, a Royal

covered with his artificial leaves

State University’s Center for

College of Art graduate who

could automatically scrub the

Bioenergy and Photosynthesis

has designed the world’s first

poisonous gas. Back on Earth,

is sceptical, however, claiming any

synthetic leaf. The technology

artificially-produced breathing

fuses chloroplasts extracted

leaves would stop working

from plants with a silk protein.

with days or even hours.

The result is a photosynthetic

Besides, what’s to stop urban

material that, Melchiorri says,

planners from just covering

lives and breathes as a leaf does.

buildings with regular leaves

Melchiorri believes his leaves

anyway?

Four years ago the Spanish city of Santander installed sensors all over the city to measure everything in a bid to save energy.

Around 12,000 sensors were put in place measuring everything from energy consumption to parking availability and even which municipal rubbish bins need emptying. Sensors are being buried in parks to measure soil dampness, preventing sprinkler overuse.

Telefonica, the Spanish telecoms giant, has even equipped local policemen with a Batman-style belt that, among other things, can detect when an officer of the law has fallen over. Dogberry hopes that Spanish police dogs will be equipped with sensor collars for pinpointing those pesky cats.

Woof to that.

renewable energy account for 16 per cent of all energy used in 2030 compared to 3 per cent in 2013. Asia will spend the most on renewable energy, $2.5trillion by 2030 compared with $967billion in Europe and $816billion in North America. Annual investment in sources such as solar, wind and hydropower surpassed fossil fuel for the

By Matt Smith, web editor

u Editor’s pick This Big City thisbigcity.net If you’re seeking a huge and frequently updated sustainable cities resource, look no further than This Big City, an awardwinning site that has been active since 2009. Scroll through the latest homepage for a look at a social library in Berlin, ideas for increasing New York’s resilience, and features on the latest in sustainable buildings.

Sustainable Cities Collective

first time in 2011.

Behind the wheels The number of electric vehicles

Motors and then Toyota. Asian

globally will exceed the one million

manufacturers also lead the pack

mark as early as the beginning of

in battery manufacturing for EVs.

2016. Researchers at the Centre

Much like consumer electronics,

for Solar Energy and Hydrogen

Asian companies are the only

Research Baden-Württemberg say

source for the lithium-ion batteries

that the number of electric vehicles

that EVs run on.

World Resources Institute

sustainablecitiescollective.com

wri.org/blog

This blog combines posts from “the world’s best thinkers on the urban future”, with both exclusive content and articles syndicated via RSS feeds. Recent posts discuss topics including trials of the world’s first battery-powered train and what London can learn from Copenhagen’s network of bicycle tracks.

The WRI works in more than 50 countries to sustain natural resources, developing and implementing research-based solutions. In the Sustainable Cities section you’ll find posts covering everything from key elements of quality public transport to the development of “people-orientated cities”.

being used worldwide climbed to just over 400,000 earlier this

Sustainable Cities at Stanford

year. That will double over the

sustainablecities.weebly.com/ blog.html

course of 2015. Demand for EVs is greatest in the USA, Japan and China. The US is well ahead with 174,000 electric cars sold, followed by Japan (68,000) and China (45,000). Nissan is the biggest manufacturer of EVs followed by General

Twitter: @dogberryTweets

Waze (FREE – Android/iOS)

Save time and money with Waze, a Google app that brings you live routes based on communitysourced traffic information.

Carbon Footprint Calculator (FREE – Android)

Discover how green your lifestyle is and where you could save money and help the environment with this free app.

Stanford University’s work on sustainable cities is documented here. The topic, which forms part of the undergraduate Urban Studies programme, features updates on students’ projects, which include work with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and a study on evictions in the city.

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Sustainable cities

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The way ahead: empowering smart cities Paul Brodrick of Siemens UK explains how new smart energy infrastructure could create sustainable cities with community energy at their heart

Cities already have many parts of the infrastructure and energy assets to be smart when it comes to their local energy systems – they just need to be enabled. An energy asset describes the component parts of the energy system: buildings, district heating schemes, electric vehicle infrastructure, to name a few. The smart grid is the gateway to a smarter energy system as it connects up and controls these decentralised assets to achieve fully integrated local networks, helping communities to reduce consumption, lower energy bills and generate their own energy5.

INDUSTRY VIEW

Energy enablement for smart cities

he city of the future is described in myriad terms: from sustainable, intelligent and smart through to eco and liveable1. However, regardless of the semantics, one certainty is that the cities of the future will continue to be major consumers of energy.

More than half the world’s population lives in cities and the trend is accelerating. Here in the UK, the country’s 64 largest cities account for just 9 per cent of the land mass, but 54 per cent of the population, 58 per cent of the jobs and 60 per cent of the UK’s gross value added (GVA)2. Energy use is increasing as cities grow, with cities already accounting for two-thirds of global energy demand and up to 70 per cent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. London alone is responsible for 8 per cent of the UK’s CO2 emissions3.

This urban growth is helping to drive an evolution in the UK’s energy landscape. Under the traditional energy system, large generators provided electricity to the transmission network for distribution to end-users. However, today we face the so-called “Energy Trilemma”: how to tackle climate change, while at the same time controlling energy costs and ensuring security of supply. This challenge, combined with the corresponding introduction of new and renewable energy generation, is changing how power is produced and consumed. As a result energy generation is no longer the single domain of traditional energy companies. Cities and their inhabitants now have greater ownership of low-carbon energy generation through smart local energy systems, and can therefore play a greater role in tackling climate change4.

Cities are by definition communities, and it is within the emerging area of community or municipal energy that cities and their inhabitants can become part of a decentralised power revolution.

The term “community energy” refers to community-owned, governed or invested energy generation projects. These can be of any type or technology6, where energy is generated, managed, stored and controlled locally with a high degree of community engagement and involvement to ensure a secure and affordable supply. Community groups, local authorities, housing associations and cities can become energy service providers to their local businesses and households, offering an alternative to today’s energy suppliers.

There are already various community energy schemes operating in cities in the UK. A number have established Energy Service Companies (ESCos) or have secured public funding from

T

Left: Paul Brodrick of Siemens UK; right and opposite page: Bristol and London are two cities benefiting from community energy schemes

the UK’s Technology Strategy Board (TSB) or EU Horizon 2020 to trial innovative technologies.

All of these schemes are making progress towards achieving their energy reduction targets and are acting as enablers for consumer behaviour change as consumers’ role in the energy system evolves.

Despite this, community energy schemes in the UK are still relatively new and a small part of the current energy mix. For example, only 3 per cent of London’s heat currently comes from efficient community heating schemes, compared with 60 per cent in Stockholm11. Under certain scenarios it is predicted that community electricity could provide between 0.5GW and 3GW of installed capacity through solar photovoltaic (PV), onshore wind and hydro projects – representing between 2.2 per cent and 14 per cent of the UK’s entire electricity consumption in 2020, or enough to meet the electricity needs of one million homes12.

A future vision for community energy If community energy realises its full potential, it could fundamentally change how the entire energy system works. A recent UKERC report on smart grid scenarios identified an energy future based on a groundswell of public engagement driving changes in the energy system towards 2030. The scenario describes how rising energy prices and the installation of smart meters stimulates an interest in self generation and local and community energy schemes where the local authority plays an increasing role, with benefits flowing back to the

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community. Connecting existing and building new decentralised generation assets alongside the installation of micro-generation, solar PV and storage assets would then enable the community to take control of its energy future.

In other countries, community energy is already in the mainstream. A new Respublica report – “Creating Local Energy Economies: Lessons from Germany” – highlights the need for a new approach. In the UK there is a reliance on the Big Six energy suppliers, which collectively hold a 93.5 per cent market share, whereas in Germany there are approximately 1,100 electricity suppliers, and the four largest energy businesses control only 44 per cent of the retail market. Households in Germany can choose from an average of 72 energy suppliers, most of which are established locally.

The opportunity of moving towards a more local, decentralised energy systems prompted the then energy and climate change minister Greg Barker to comment at last year’s Tory party conference that “the Big Six need to become the Big 60,000”.

There are examples of where a connected decentralised energy system is providing real benefits for consumers. In Munich, for example, the Stadtwerke München has connected a number of controllable decentralised assets, including cogeneration, wind, biomass and small hydro plants, to form a “Virtual Power Plant”, unlocking the value of a multi-portfolio approach to providing energy to consumers. Typically in the UK, we see a number of disparate single assets that could be brought together in a similar way by either a city-wide or community-wide scheme. However, the situation is not quite so straightforward here.

Bringing community energy into the mainstream Community energy has the potential for cities to take charge of their energy assets and create new business models. Smart-grid technology connects the consumer to the energy generation process, enabling new business models and unlocking new revenue streams. These new revenue streams can support the growth of smart communities and contribute to the economic well-being of cities and towns in challenging times.

However, creating a community-enabled energy system is by no means straightforward.

Establishing a start-up community energy company – or ESCo – is far from easy, and there are significant barriers, including access to finance, an overcomplicated planning process as well as inaccurate public perceptions of what community energy is. The initiators of current and future schemes need support from the outset from both government and technology companies such as Siemens to make their vision a reality and to pass on the benefits to their communities.

Respublica calls for government to undertake a number of reforms to facilitate local energy systems. Crucially, it recommends that barriers to being an electricity supplier are removed and that local supply licences should be made possible to stimulate a local energy market. This would encourage communities to generate their own energy and supply their own people.

The availability of technology is not the issue here; appropriate changes in how the market is regulated can unlock this energy revolution.

Community Energy England director general Philip Wolfe agrees that the barriers are more regulatory than technological. “The UK’s current energy system is dysfunctional and under stress because it has been designed to suit a small group

of incumbent providers,” he says. “Regulations need to be redrafted to allow communities and independents to play their part in the market if we want to break the spiral of increasing prices, fuel poverty and consumer distrust.”

None the less, working with a technology partner from the outset can simplify the process.

From initial market entry, through the complex world of smart metering and ultimately connecting controllable generation assets, expert advice and guidance from Siemens and others can unlock the enormous potential of these schemes for a city’s carbon-reduction targets and finances. It will take time and barriers remain, but step-by-step a revolution in small-scale energy generation could be on its way, helping to reduce energy costs and meet our environmental goals.

Interested in community energy? Check out Community Energy Fortnight, September 13-18 http://ukcec.org 1. Moir, E, Moonen T, Clark, C, Future Cities? Orgins, Meanings & Uses (Business of Cities for the Foresight Future of Cities Project and the Future Cities Catapult), (June 2014). Direct link: futurecities.catapult.org.uk/documents/6697210/0/What+are+Future+ Cities_+July2014.pdf/4c93a7e4-44e1-4ee0-8e65-ad2a08f28506 2. As above 3. www.lep.org.uk/energy.htm 4. Smart Grids: best practice fundamentals for a Modern Energy System (World Energy Council) (2012) Direct link: www.worldenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/PUB_Smart_grids_ best_practice_fundamentals_for_a_modern_energy_system_2012_WEC.pdf 5. w ww.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/285417/Smart_Grid_Vision_and_RoutemapFINAL.pdf 6. respublica.org.uk/documents/lfv_Community%20Energy%20 -%20Unlocking%20Finance%20and%20Investment%20-%20 The%20Way%20Ahead%20-%20UPDATED%20DESIGN.pdf 7. Moir, E, Moonen T, Clark, C, Future Cities? Orgins, Meanings & Uses (Business of Cities for the Foresight Future of Cities Project and the Future Cities Catapult). June 2014. Direct link: https:// futurecities.catapult.org.uk/documents/6697210/0/What+ar e+Future+Cities_+July2014.pdf/4c93a7e4-44e1-4ee0-8e65ad2a08f28506 8. manchesterismyplanet.com/news 9. futurecity.glasgow.gov.uk/ 10. w ww.stepupsmartcities.eu/EnergyPlanning/ESCoUsesinSEAP/tabid/3267/Default.aspx 11. www.lep.org.uk/energy.htm 12. w ww.gov.uk/government/publications/community-renewable-electricity-generation-potential-sector-growth-to-2020

Sustainable cities

17

Community energy schemes in UK cities – the highlights The Community Energy Strategy7 identifies numerous community energy projects in the UK alone, some rural but mostly urban.

These varied schemes range from renewable energy generation through to power purchase agreements which facilitate the sale of energy between individuals or organisations.

• Bristol recently launched its Bristol Community Strategy for Energy and created the Bristol Energy Cooperative in support of its local energy ambitions. Bristol will be European Green Capital in 2015.

• The Nottingham Energy Partnership has been operating for a number of years on various projects, including The Meadows Community Energy Partnership (MOZES). This scheme is aiming to turn the area into Nottingham’s first low-carbon neighbourhood.

• Manchester City Council is creating a Greater Manchester Green Deal and Energy Company (ECO) Partnership. It will be focused on the domestic sector with housing energy efficiency retrofit activity across Greater Manchester8.

• Earlier in the year, DECC awarded £20m funding to Stoke-on-Trent as part of the City Deals scheme to bring the UK’s first ever large-scale low carbon heat network system to the city.

• In London, The Greater London Authority (GL A) has already developed a prequalification questionnaire to procure energy supply services to support the GLA’s energy master plan.

• The Low Carbon Hub in Oxford is enabling a number of community energy projects in

the city, as well as across Oxfordshire.

• Future City/Glasgow is a £24million programme which will demonstrate how technology can make life in the city smarter, safer and more sustainable. Glasgow beat 29 other cities to win funding for the programme in a contest run by the TSB. The city is now embarking on a programme which will put residents at the forefront of technology integration and application.

Analysis of data collected during the demonstrator will assist policymakers and inform future investment9.

• Also in Scotland, Aberdeen Heat and Power is an ESCo that was established in 2002 and is providing district heating to 1,600 flats and nine public buildings in the city of Aberdeen, a partner in the Scottish Cities Alliance10.

• Newcastle Science Central is a 24acre city centre mixed-use development which the project is delivering on behalf of its partners, Newcastle University and Newcastle City Council. The partnership is creating a demonstration site where innovative urban technologies will be trialled.

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Sustainable transport is the life blood of sustainable living

The future

The virtues of virtual power plants Antony Gormley I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanise it

Sustainable cities Industry view

Business Zone

“

S

tadtwerke München (SWM), Munich’s public utility and one of the largest energy and infrastructure companies in Germany, was faced with

the challenge of integrating an increasing number of small distributed energy producers into their power grid. This is an issue now being faced by a number of

cities in the UK which want to move to a decentralised or community energy model.

SWM needed a solution that would improve the reliability of planning and

forecasting of connected, distributed generation assets, loads and storage in order to provide local security of supply while at the same time unlocking new revenue streams and business models.

Working together, SWM and Siemens created a virtual power plant (VPP) in which many small-scale, distributed energy sources are connected, pooled and operated as a single plant. In the first phase, decentralised cogeneration plants and renewable energy plants were integrated.

The core component of this virtual interconnection is the Decentralised Energy Management System DEMS® from Siemens. The virtual power plant enables reliable and cost-effective local operation and provides the opportunity for additional revenue streams to support other city-wide investment. www.siemens.com/smartgrid info.smartgrid.gb@siemens. com

Left: Using the Siemens DEMS® system, the virtual power plant (VPP) connects distributed energy sources to provide a single platform of information from which to make better decisions for the benefit of the entire community scheme

In focus: The FM industry is taking a

greater role in achieving energy savings

T

he FM industry needs to continue to use its expertise to help businesses reduce their energy consumption, according to Peter Mosley, managing director of FM contractor Mitie Technical Facilities Management.

“As the people who run the buildings, facilities managers are perfectly placed to identify energy waste and provide a valuable insight into how businesses are using their energy,” he says.

Strategic outsourcer Mitie delivers integrated FM services for a number of

large multi-site clients, and energy management is now, almost without exception, an integral part of every contract.

The company is working closely with its clients to identify areas of energy waste and manage consumption as efficiently as possible, often putting in place dedicated energy management resources to drive improvements.

“Technology is playing an important part too, allowing us to remotely monitor and control a client’s energy use and investigate any spikes in consumption,” says Mosley. “Our clients can

see the scale of the savings they’re achieving, and often we’re able to guarantee these savings in advance, effectively making their investment financially risk free.”

Mitie is currently delivering a number of guaranteed energy performance contracts for large institutions across the public and private sector, with energy savings often exceeding 30 per cent, through a combination of measures suggested by Mitie and behavioural change.

Few organisations are realising the returns that can

be made from relatively simple low-cost programmes, so expect the FM industry to continue making the business case to their clients. energy@mitie.com

F

or a civillisation to be sustainable, the transport system it uses needs to run efficiently, economically and reduce carbon emissions.

“This approach has to be far more than skin deep and go back right to the sources,” says John Keefe, director of public affairs at Eurotunnel.

“We have a specific department that spends all its time looking for energy-saving measures.”

At Eurotunnel, this involves teaching drivers how to be economical and drive in an efficient manner. Drivers will accelerate going downhill and use uphill sections to brake, to get the maximum advantage out of the natural properties of the terminal and tunnel.

The railway is electrically powered, and electric vehicles are used to drive staff around terminals.

A recycling and waste reduction programme is also in operation. Keefe says: “If a railway part becomes faulty we look at repairing it first, then if cannot be repaired it is recycled. If it can’t be recycle it then goes into waste recycling.

Everything is reused again.”

The design of the tunnel is environmentally friendly. It does not have an impact on outside surroundings and as it is underground, reduces the level of noise. Keefe says: “All of those things give us a continuing improvement in our environmental footprint on many levels whether it is noise, waste, electrical consumption or the emission of greenhouse gasses.”

Thanks to these kinds of environmental improvements, Eurotunnel has been awarded the Carbon Trust Standard certification three years in a row. eurotunnelfreight.com

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The debate Where do you see the future of urban sustainability?

Siobhan Riordan Group sustainability advisor, Eurovia UK

George McGhee Chief executive NetThings

Dr Don McLean Founder and managing director, IES

Dr Chris Iddon Design manager SE Controls

To support future growth and optimise productivity output, it is imperative that sustainable cities continue to invest in the development of current and new systems.

The internet plays a crucial role in allowing technology solutions to be implemented cost effectively and with ease, maximising return on investment.

With global network connectivity accelerating, soon everything we can imagine will be connected, enabling people to use the internet to interact with all of these systems from the palm of their hand. This presents a great opportunity to equip cities with the tools to monitor and control their environments, energy use and waste levels, driving change in the lifestyles of their inhabitants. In order to maintain sustainability people must be empowered to make changes through effortless control of their surroundings.

Only then will cities have the power to efficiently reduce waste and optimise energy usage.

As we move towards adaption policies to minimise the impact of climate change, and with increasing urbanisation due to a greater percentage of the world’s population living in cities, we have a unique opportunity to make our cities more sustainable.

The starting block is an eco-smart building capable of minimising energy consumption.

This would require much greater use of real-time building simulation to optimise performance in conjunction with innovative ICT solutions, to ensure a more energy and resource efficient component of smart cities.

These smart buildings would work intelligently with each other and the utilities to optimise their performance, both individually and collectively. Neighbourhoods can be formed into districts, districts into cities and cities into countries.

Out of the plethora of ICT solutions there are a number that are truly innovative and when combined with building simulation will deliver sustainability for everything, from a smart building to a smart country.

The future lies in adopting a more holistic view of energy efficiency and building design to create comfortable internal environments, as focusing on issues in isolation can lead to unintended consequences such as summertime overheating and poor indoor air quality (IAQ).

A vital part of this process is to develop a more detailed understanding of the indoor environment by augmenting building modelling systems with real measured data and post-occupancy analysis to refine and improve building performance.

Without learning from current building performance we are in danger of just building to meet regulations that may not deliver the sustainable benefits predicted. Improved data analysis not only leads to better design, but also more effective building control systems, with a direct impact on energy efficiency and IAQ. By using advanced controls to monitor and manage internal spaces within buildings, a healthy and comfortable environment can still be achieved while ensuring that energy isn’t wasted unnecessarily.

info@eurovia.co.uk www.eurovia.co.uk

info@netthings.co.uk www.netthings.co.uk

0141 945 8500 www.iesve.com

info@secontrols.com www.secontrols.com

ExpertInsight

Over the last 10 years, energy legislation in the UK has evolved with new regulations added. Managing energy has always been a priority at Eurovia UK – but the drive to reduce carbon emissions has seen efforts increase.

Our industry – highways maintenance, contracting and production – is traditionally a large energy consumer. Steps taken towards energy efficiency at Eurovia UK have always been with the longer term in mind. Investing in new efficient burners for our asphalt plants and improving our fleet with electric/hybrid vehicles are both examples of some of the improvements made to date.

We have also defined our carbon footprint. By reviewing the wider impacts of our activities – such as our products, their use, delivery and ultimate disposal – we have been able to develop and certify our energy management system to meet ISO 50001 requirements. This tool will be used throughout our business to develop our entire approach to managing energy, as well as support us to comply with energy regulations.

Turkey: making progress through environmental investment INDUSTRY VIEW

O

ver the last decade, Turkey has been undergoing a profound transformation and has been able to retain sound macroeconomic fundamentals thanks to the structural reforms made by the pro-business, stable government. As a result of these reforms, Turkey has emerged as one of the most vibrant economies and one of the most appealing investment destinations in the world. The economy has been growing over 5 per cent per year since 2002. In the meantime, GDP per capita has more than tripled, while exports have increased almost sixfold since the 2000s.

While the economy is expanding, environmental awareness is growing, both in the public and private sectors. Turkey has made sizeable investments for a cleaner and healthier environment over the last decade. Local governments have supported disabled citizens and lower-income communities to effectively transform the culture of municipal work and improve the scope and quality of services.

Meanwhile, tax revenues and the mandate of local governments have grown to allow municipalities to make larger investments and provide more diverse services in a more effective manner.

The country has made significant progress with regard to the environment, through the implementation of development initiatives to protect the environment and reduce pollution by means of building recycling facilities and employing modern environmental technologies.

Compared to 35 per cent in 2002, the share of urban residents with access to water treatment services climbed to 72 per cent by 2013. The number of waste storage facilities has risen from 15 to 69 over the past 12 years, which serve 903 municipal districts and 44.5 million citizens. Seven waste storage facilities, including Istanbul, Ankara and Gaziantep, have been producing electricity on their grounds.

Meanwhile, the number of licensed packaging collection and recycling facilities has risen from 28 to 806, and today Turkey recycles 50 per cent of all packaging materials.

Since 2005, the government has provided assistance to several municipal projects, including waste water purification facilities, sewage treatment systems and waste treatment and storage units, in order to reduce environmental pollution, with an investment amount of 840million Turkish lira. As regards the environment, Turkey aims to strike a healthy balance between economic development and environmental

protection and implement necessary actions to boost the quality of life through an environmental administration system meeting global standards.

The Investment Support and Promotion Agency of Turkey (ISPAT) focuses on high-technology, high value-added and environmentally-friendly investments. The investment projects that contribute to Turkey’s sustainable growth, both economically and environmentally, are our top priorities. info@invest.gov.tr www.invest.gov.tr

More than 37,500 foreign companies have already invested in Turkey.

How about you?

One of the fastest growing economies in the world and the fastest growing economy in Europe with an average annual real GDP growth rate of 5,1% over the past decade (2004-2013) The fastest growing economy among the OECD members with an average annual growth rate of 5.2% (OECD 2012-2017) 16th largest economy in the world with over $1,1 trillion GDP at PPP (IMF 2013)

A population of 76,6 million with half under the age of 30,4 Access to Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa Highly competitive investment incentives as well as exclusive R&D support Around 610,000 university graduates per year