Last year also saw the introduction of the 'Market Application Day', offering insights into various construction sectors like hospitals, manufacturing and data centres.. 2.
Data helps us to close the performance gap and make sure buildings perform as well as, or even better than, they do in the design stage.As we’re able to drive better and better performance through energy efficient equipment and passive design techniques, we can actually start reducing our operational carbon right from the early design stages.
This decrease in operational carbon will continue over time with things like the decarbonisation of the electricity grid.However, the result is that embodied carbon in buildings, due to material usage and the amount of carbon which is integral to the building itself, becomes a larger proportion of the overall carbon emitted from the building across its lifespan.As such, embodied carbon is increasingly playing a much bigger role in our day-to-day focus on sustainability as architects and designers..
Embodied carbon varies based on the building typology.For example, in residential architecture, we might see a ratio of one third embodied carbon to two thirds operational carbon across a building’s lifespan.
On the other hand, with a building like a data centre, where the operational energy of the building is very high, operational carbon will always be a larger portion of the total, whole-life carbon of the building..
The good news is that our data is improving all the time, and the industry is gaining momentum around the issue of sustainability with respect to embodied carbon.Another metaphor is to reduce the viscosity of business.
I don’t know whether you have ever made a non-Newtonian fluid by mixing cornflour with water?As soon as you try to move the fluid its viscosity rises exponentially; in fact, people have walked across swimming pools of the stuff.. For me, both the Devil’s Snare and the cornflour explain one of the key reasons why we fail in doing the great things we are all capable of.
We become wedded to one way of doing them and when we don’t get the results we want, we think we just need to try harder, to struggle more or to do more work.The results are the opposite to what we expect.. You can see this all around us in the season of festivities.