Just the Facts: article on Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, by David J C MacKay
2009“Have you read David MacKay’s book? It’s great and so useful,” said one of the several fellow sustainability enthusiasts who pressed me to take it in. So, I did and it is. And I thought you should know about it too. It helps a lot with sorting the myths from the wishful thinking and the really good ideas.
MacKay sets out to do the physics and the maths to see whether Britain, and the world’s, energy needs might be met from sustainable sources without a radical change in the lifestyles to which we seem so attached or to which the Chinese aspire. Is there enough potential to allow us to stop using fossil fuels by the mid century? Is it sensible to capture renewables at the building rather than rely on district or national sources? Is hydrogen the fuel of the future? Can biomass really be significant? Is most ‘greenspeak’ hogwash? He sets out to provide facts and alternative scenarios, without the economic dimension, leaving that for development by others. Economics however does follow thermodynamic efficiency and that he makes clear. It’s written in a very accessible style, with copious footnotes and website links to back it up, and half the book is technical chapters to go behind the storyline into aspects of demand and supply.
His first sensible idea is to convert all comparisons of demand and supply to the same units: kilowatt hours per person per day (kwh/p/d). All forms of energy can thus be read off against each other: we each use about 40kwh/d to run cars on petrol; onshore wind energy developed to a very high degree could deliver 20kwh/p/d. One annual long-haul flight each costs 30kwh/p/d. Solar thermal heating, fully deployed, could provide 13kwh/p/d. MacKay builds up a demand profile (a pink column) for an affluent UK resident and then the supply potential (a green column) of each of the renewables, including nuclear and ‘clean coal’ if they could supply for a very long time (one thousand years).He also describes renewables in terms of their ability to deliver power per square metre of land occupied, enabling comparisons of biofuel, wind and solar.
The RIBA has adopted the stance known as ‘Contract and Converge’, supporting the idea that developed nations would reduce their carbon emissions whilst those of developing nations initially rose, both falling by mid-century to similar levels considered sustainable. That level is probably about one to two tons of CO2 per capita versus the 11-ton UK average today. It does effectively mean eliminating the use of fossil fuel, not just using it very efficiently. Just to retain jet travel could use all of our allowance. The question of its practicability, and the sensible steps towards it, are vitally important now. By 2050, at normal levels of investment, we will have replaced 40% of our housing and replaced or refurbished all of our non-residential building, some more than once. We shall also have replaced all our fossil and nuclear power stations. The main burden of change in buildings falls on the existing stock, which will still dominate the demand side. Given three strategies: reduction of the use of energy, increase in the efficiency of its use and de-carbonising of its supply, what combination of effort will deliver the most?
MacKay makes consideration of our options easier by devising a simplified ‘Cartoon Britain’ in which our current demand for 125kwh/p/d is met in a variety of ways. The demand, in Cartoon Britain, is a mixture of need for power for electrical devices, need for heat and need for transport. (see fig 27.1,p 204). Future consumption levels, even with economic growth, are assumed to remain similar, thanks to increase in efficiency. For MacKay, the future looks electric, based on its relative efficacy. Whilst some heat needs are met by solar and biomass, especially in new build, most are better met by ground or air source electric heat pumps. He sees efficient ways of using gas, like CHP, to be wasted steps as heat pumps are far more efficient even when the power is from gas fired stations and can move on to any renewable source of power. Electric vehicles score well against other possibilities to take over ground transport. Hydrogen is not a runner on the numbers. Biofuel is too small a resource; aircraft could use all we could make. Assuming some success in reducing the use of energy and increasing the efficiency of use (our role as designers) he ends up with a demand for 48kwd/p/d of electricity, about two and a half times our current supply.
How could we get that 48kwh/p/d?
MacKay shows five alternative plans (fig 27.9 p212) for raising it from a mixture of domestic and imported renewables, nuclear, and clean coal. He invites us to consider the environmental and political factors in selecting a mix. A wind dominant scenario sees the UK and its coastal waters plated in turbines, and pumped storage to smooth out supply. He worries about NIMBYs limiting provision. A nuclear dominant scenario has 110GW of power stations, twice the current French fleet. One option, which won’t please the independence party, suggests that solar-thermal electricity, made in the Sahara, could provide power for a billion people. All of Europe, the Middle East and Africa could receive power at UK per capita levels with a plant area the size of Morocco. A Wales-sized array would serve the UK. The desert states could thus continue selling us energy, but clean stuff.
The investments will be vast so the cost of power will rise commensurately. That will cost-justify low energy design and smart technologies, compact cities and public transport. But we can get what we think we want without revolution, says MacKay. And it won’t be done by Code 6 homes or zero-carbon offices but largely by decarbonising grid supplies.
Published in the RIBA Journal 2009.
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Be Valuable: A guide to creating value in the built environment
2005
‘Be Valuable’ is the report of a working group of ‘Be: collaborating for the built environment’. This ginger group, chaired by Richard, was the successor to the Reading Construction Forum and the Design-Build Foundation and is one of the earliest studies of the true value of built assets.
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A Question of Values
2006
Each year the Worshipful Company of Architects (the Architects’ Company) holds a public lecture, initially called the Milo Lecture after the first Company Clerk. The Masters of other Livery Companies are invited to attend. In my year as Master (2005-06) I gave the lecture myself. The subject was the tension within the profession between the roles of artist and of professional. The lecture was delivered at RIBA Headquarters where I was Vice President at the time.
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The Well Advised Client: improving project effectiveness through strategic advice.
2011
The success of any construction project depends on the client. However good the rest of the team is, the knowledge, strength and wisdom of the client are decisive for the achievement of goals. This is well evidenced by the difference between the results achieved by ‘professional clients’: developers, large companies and some universities, and those produced by clients who do not build continuously or have standing, expert teams. This group are by far the majority however. How are they to get what they need from the construction industry?
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The Value Agenda
2011
We all want to make our investments in building deliver the outcomes we seek. Yet for many clients there is not sufficient time or resource to begin the project on a sound basis. Too many projects discover what they should really be like after they are well on the way, with inevitable effects on cost and time and many disappointments as goals are missed. The importance of starting well cannot be over emphasised.
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Towards Value-based Procurement
2020
I return to this topic again as it advances continuously. Government struggles with its procurement policy as forces pull in opposite directions. On the one hand, established practice is to seek lowest capital cost for design and construction in order to spread available resources over the most constituencies possible. On the other hand, there is growing awareness that processes seeking lowest first cost tend to produce poor value. Value is not just price, but a more complex concept embodying benefits and costs created for stakeholders over the life of an asset. These benefits can be economic, but also social and environmental. Lowest first cost can be at the expense of whole-life cost as so-called ‘value engineering’ downgrades specification to hit Capex targets or make more profit than is possible at the bid price. Low capital cost can also be at the expense of environmental performance standards, with building regulations still being a low bar to cross and nowhere near ‘Net-Zero’. Social value is increasingly a focus in procurement, defined as benefit to the community in which a development is planned, creating local jobs, skills and amenities.
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The size of the Built Environment sector
2021
The scale of the construction industry is regularly understated in statistics as they omit professional services, manufacturing, materials extraction, and embodied energy. The more important understatement is that construction is a narrow definition of the services providing our built environment. This is a blend of property, design, manufacturing, construction, and management services with an annual share of GDP of over 17%. Most recent RICS figures, before the distortions of 2020, suggest the following:
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Thinking About Building
1985
NEDO commissioned BDP to create a client guide to the procurement of design and construction, based on the NEDO research report ‘Faster Building for Industry’. It included a gameboard of options for assembling the team, together with a scoring approach to help choose an option.
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The JCT Povey Lecture: Vision for the Industry
2003
Introduction
On Wednesday, 29th October 2003 Richard Saxon CBE, Vice-President of the RIBA, Director of BDP and Chairman of Be gave the following lecture entitled ‘Vision for Industry (formerly known as construction)’ to invited guests of The Joint Contracts Tribunal at the Jarvis Hall, Royal Institute of British Architects.
This lecture was the inaugural JCT Povey Lecture, an event by way of a public acknowledgement and tribute to Philip Povey, who served the JCT for over fifty years.
The JCT Povey Lecture is to be an annual event at which an eminent person will be invited to give his/her thoughts on significant matters that are relevant to the construction and property industry.
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Integrated Project Delivery: the new Plan of Work
2009
The American architectural profession has discovered Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) and is enthused by it. At the recent AIA Convention in Boston there were numerous meetings about it and its closely related subject, Building Information Modelling (BIM). The AIA has just published its guidance on IPD at www.aia.org/ipdg
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Is Offsite Construction the Answer?
2017
The construction industry is heading for the buffers. Capacity is draining out as skilled tradesmen retire and few enter as apprentices. The go-to supply of EU migrant tradesmen is likely to be restricted soon and is already less interested as the pound falls. Construction quality is declining in the housebuilding world. Mark Farmer’s message: Modernise or Die, is clear that a major move to offsite construction is needed to keep the industry from decline. The core problem is low productivity growth in construction, globally under 1% per annum when manufacturing achieves 3.6%. There are many causes of this, but the making of buildings on site, in all weathers, is one of them.
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Re-Integration
2018
The collapse of Carillion is probably another nail in the coffin of the current UK model of main contracting where virtually all the trade work is subcontracted. Over fifty years in the industry, I have seen the change from traditional contractors with their main trades in-house to the current, unsustainable pattern. The vertically integrated contractor was brought down by recurrent business cycles which punish employers. Once the idea spread that trade specialists could be hired in just when needed, taking them off the contractor’s books, that approach spread fast. Tier Two firms could be left with the work of recruiting and training people, innovating in their specialism and managing the risk handed down to them. They could also provide working capital to the main contractor by accepting slow payment for their work. Most of the business cycle impact became ‘subcontracted out’. In practice, with Tier Two firms bidding at low margins to win work from the Tier One contractor, the scope for innovation and proper training was driven out. One of the stubborn failures of the industry since this pattern became the norm has been the lack of any productivity growth. Scratch teams, built up per project, learn nothing from experience and waste considerable resources in the procurement process. The critique of the method reads:
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Lucky 13?
2018
Construction is many industries within one classification. It stretches from the mammoth to the minute, from infrastructure work like HS2 to household repair tasks. Any critique of construction therefore needs to recognise the part of the industry to which it refers. The statistical classification of the industry also fails to include its clients and consultants, essential parts of the cultural and economic system of the built environment. All that having been said, new initiatives at one end of the scale spectrum could create momentum for change across much of the industry.
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Professional Futures
2018
Every part of the construction industry is challenged by rapidly evolving threats: stagnant productivity, falling human resources, failing business models, climate change, globalisation, advancing computer power, to name some of them. Most attention is paid to the plight of contractors and specialists, but the world of consultancy also faces these same issues. Professionals additionally face falling credibility and authority as respect for expertise declines. Their professional institutions seem powerless to communicate the value of the professional contribution to the public, to clients and to government.
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The Question of Quality
2019
When a construction client signs a contract to deliver a project, they usually have three targets in mind: to deliver the required facility on budget, on time and to required quality. Cost and Time have proved relatively manageable, with objective evidence and increasingly clever tools with which to manage. Quality has never been so simple. There is a perceived degree of subjectivity about it and it is quite hard to monitor the progress of work to ensure that all standards are being maintained. The result has been that whenever there is pressure on cost or time, it’s usually quality that suffers. Value Engineering has become an ironic term as it usually means cost reduction by reducing the quality that delivers required value.
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Construction: service or product?
2020
The Office for National Statistics lists the construction industry as part of the service sector. This makes some sense in that we provide bespoke facilities to customers rather like a restaurant provides meals. However, our output is not a transient meal but delivers a very concrete asset which needs looking after for its whole life, a service we do not provide except reactively. We treat our output like a product, leaving the buyer to look after it. Owners are not often expert at this, generating waste and depreciation. Our landlord and tenant legislation dumps repair and maintenance responsibility on unskilled tenants, charging them to restore the property to its original state on departure or pay ‘dilapidations’.
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Construction’s new Playbook
2021
You may not know that I have been a long-time fan of American Football. The game is sometimes called ‘violent chess’ as it’s based on pre-planned ‘plays’ by one side’s offence team and the other’s defence team. The plays are radioed into the quarterback, the leader of the offence, by a coach on the side-line and the whole team must remember the moves implied by the coded name of the play, then execute it flawlessly. All the team’s plays are set down in their playbook, a secret document that team members must learn by heart and practice continuously. New plays are devised all the time too. No wonder the game originated in colleges.
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Changing our Industry: three Horizons, four Capitals
2023
A generation has passed since the excitement of the 1990s as first Latham and then Egan called for radical change in the construction industry. Initiatives seemed to pour out of both government and the industry, yet here we are still with an industry which seems much the same, racked by cost pressures, defensive, risky, unsustainable and unattractive to the workforce that it needs. We seem to live in Groundhog Day, repeating the traditional process with scratch teams, collaborating weakly and producing poor results.
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High Street Schools
2007
Britain is building or rebuilding all its thousands of primary and secondary schools to fit them for today’s needs. Many new schools are being founded, especially in areas of population growth. The location and design of these schools is not however being considered as part of the drive to more sustainable communities. This article looks at what could and should be happening.
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Valuing Sustainability
2007
Sustainability is the greatest challenge faced by our civilisation, in that, as other speakers in this distinguished series have said, and as Sir Nicholas Stern’s report has recently demonstrated, its current trajectory cannot be indefinitely sustained, economically, environmentally or socially. The transition to a sustainable path is however beset by barriers, of which the most entrenched is the perception that long-term environmental sustainability, the most urgent issue, is not achievable without short-term economic loss and politically unacceptable lifestyle change. Whilst the triple-bottom-line concept of Sustainability implies that economic and social sustainability cannot exist without environmental sustainability, the reverse is also true. We cannot hope to achieve a sustainable environment unless we can afford it, through continuing economic success and increasing social equity across the planet. This suggests a concentration on seeking low-cost techniques to reduce emissions and on increasing our economic ability to fund less affordable methods.
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Just the Facts: article on Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, by David J C MacKay
2009
“Have you read David MacKay’s book? It’s great and so useful,” said one of the several fellow sustainability enthusiasts who pressed me to take it in. So, I did and it is. And I thought you should know about it too. It helps a lot with sorting the myths from the wishful thinking and the really good ideas.
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Going Soft
2017
We need to be harder on ourselves as an industry and admit that most of our new buildings reach the end of their defects liability period without ever delivering the performance that they promised. BREEAM ratings at design stage do not predict carbon emissions commensurate with the grading. Sometimes, the certificated building burns several times the expected energy consumption. And typically, we don’t go back to analyse the performance, nor the workability of the design for the purpose intended. We move on to the next project. Clients rarely complain, as their expectations were never high, nor clearly stated.
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Is a sustainable built environment possible?
2019
The Extinction Rebellion movement has certainly rekindled the awareness of everyone that climate change is real, and that drastic action is essential. But what can we in the built environment do differently other than the slow, incremental changes that are in train? Recent books point the way and give rise to some optimism.
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Australia sweeps Test series
2019
No, this isn’t about cricket. Its about learning from Australia how to deliver buildings that perform as specified. In October 2017 I wrote about the ‘Soft Landings’ concept as a way for designers and builders to incorporate facility management needs into their process and ensure that buildings perform properly. This tool is part of the Government’s version of BIM Level 2, but not widely understood or used beyond that. We remain a country with published aspirations to achieve high physical performance in buildings but with a woeful record of underachievement. Why is this?
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Might building performance become contractual?
2020
At present, building contracts are designed to manage the completion of a capital project on budget, on time and without defects, dealing with failures should they arise. The new situation, driven by concern for climate change and for occupant safety, is that buildings must also perform as promised, over time.
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Net Zero: harder than it looks
2021
The push to decarbonise the built environment by mid-century can be portrayed as simply going all-electric and relying on the grid to become carbon free. But that does not consider the difficulty of meeting the resultant electricity demand from net-zero sources. UK FIRES (ref) estimates that electricity demand by 2050, from industry, transport and buildings, would be double the level of potential net-zero supply if expected usage patterns duly emerge. Ramping up carbon-free power supply from all sources is happening at a good rate, but it is not credible that this growth rate can be raised much more in the next 29 years. Even generating green hydrogen as a fuel competes at peak hours with using more efficient carbon-free power directly.
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Growth Through BIM
2013
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One Building or Two?
2016
The conventional client for a construction project has focussed on achieving success in getting their requirements delivered to quality, on time and on budget. It has been a capital project mind-set, measuring achievement over the period up to the final account. Those clients who own the building tend to change the accounting status and the leadership involved at the end of the capital phase, handing the facility manager, who is rarely involved before this point, a bundle of information from the contractor to help them start to set up the Operation and Maintenance system they will need. Those who sell the building on after completion and letting have even less interest in the life of their creation, passing responsibility to the investor and tenants to make the best of it.
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BIM for Construction Clients
2016
In 2016 the RIBA’s then-subsidiary, NBS, published Richard Saxon’s book, BIM for Construction Clients, to mark the start of the UK government mandate that government projects should use BIM. The book explains the advantages of BIM in client terms and provides case studies of pioneering projects. The content is based on the UK provisional standard PAS 1192 and the then-current concept of Level 2 BIM. In 2019 this standard was replaced by an international one, ISO 19650. This was founded on PAS 1192 but changed a lot of the language and some of the assumptions. Extensive guidance to the use of the ISO standard was then published as the UK BIM Framework. The book is therefore no longer a useful guide to current practice, though it does give a picture of the pioneering stage of UK BIM.
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Briefmaking for Better Information Management: adding information matters to the briefing process
2016
The architectural process starts with extracting the brief from the client and related stakeholders. Traditionally briefmaking has concentrated on the design requirements for the building, plus the time and cost issues to be met. Now we have a further dimension to manage, the information requirements which will enable the client and team to benefit from using digital Information Management (IM). This article offers an approach to gathering the information brief which fits onto the familiar matrix of briefmaking.
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The Digital Twin: why, what and how
2018
The built environment is officially regarded as an enabler of the economy and of our quality of life. By the ‘built environment’ I mean the complex of economic sectors which plan, regulate, develop, design and build, operate and maintain the physical fabric of our civilisation, its buildings and infrastructure. These sectors total between 15 and 20% of the total economy and the current government view is that the success of built environment investments should be measured by the outcomes they support for the economy and society.
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BIM and JCT Contracts.
2019
JCT is in favour of BIM. It can reduce risks and disputes whilst increasing effective collaboration on projects. But it does have to be applied with knowledge and skill. A new guidance document from JCT attempts to fill a gap identified in the skills of clients and their advisers, moving us towards the goal of making BIM ‘business as usual’.
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Better Information Management
2020
Readers may be familiar with my interest in Building Information Modelling or BIM. Since the turn of the century, I have been involved with the concept, helping to spur the government to make it their policy to mandate its use. In 2012 I was commissioned to produce a report for what is now BEIS on ‘BIM for Growth’, the potential effect on economic growth of the uptake of BIM in the UK. I became ‘UK BIM Ambassador for Growth’ in 2012-13. A place on the Steering Committee of the BIM Task Group was also provided as it evolved what became BIM Level 2 and the PAS 1192 set of draft standards in 2013. British BIM shot forward and became the world leader as the government mandate arrived in 2016.
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Disappointed Party
2020
ISO 19650, the world standard for using BIM, is a great UK achievement. The guidance produced by the UK BIM Alliance on how to use the standard is also excellent, except for one area where it leaves me gasping, taking jargon to new depths of obscurity.
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Right First Time: a major payback from Better Information Management
2021
Construction project teams shoot themselves in the foot all the time. A minority of projects come in on or below cost and time targets. Errors cost them far more than the typical industry profit margin. The Get It Right Initiative (GIRI) (1), an industry group focussed on the error issue, reckons that 5% of project cost is directly down to mistakes, with 21% in total after indirect costs, unrecorded waste and latent defects are counted. The top ten causes of this mayhem are listed as:
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Information Management: What, Why and How
2022
You have heard of BIM, but what is IM or Information Management? And why has it replaced BIM as the focus of digital processes for the built environment? Thirdly, how do you use IM to deliver the desired outcomes?
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Taming The Tsunami
2023
‘Taming the Tsunami’ is the Deploi client guide to information management for projects and assets.
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Book : Atrium Buildings – Development and Design
1983
During the 1970s Richard became interested in the newly revived concept of the atrium building, one where space is arranged around an indoor courtyard. Travels and research showed that the idea had a complex history and many influences. The 1983 book maps these influences and considers the technical challenges of designing stimulating and safe atrium buildings. The book was revised in 1986 for a second edition.Continue Reading -
Book : The Atrium Comes of Age
1984
The first book was in black and white only. Many spectacular atrium buildings were created in the 1980s and the second book provides colour images of the most important examples, grouped by building use. There is also a stronger historical background, updated fire safety advice and a gazetteer of the best examples worldwide. This book was also re-published in the US and Japan.
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