CarbonBuzz wins three-year grant
CarbonBuzz, the architectural and building services engineering community’s carbon management scheme, which provides an online platform to benchmark and track project energy use from design to operation, has been awarded a three-year match funding grant from the Technology Strategy Board under the Design & Decision tools competition.
The £750,000 total project cost will cover the development of the platform into an ‘authoritative’ database for CO2 emissions of buildings in the UK and abroad.
Project partners funding over 50% of the project include the RIBA, CIBSE, BRE, Aedas, FCB Studios, AECOM, Davis Langdon, Autodesk and XCO2 Energy. The academic partner, University College London Energy Institute, will be auditing the database and revising the data structure. Aedas, the originators of CarbonBuzz, will be coordinating the input of the partners as well as client and operator steering groups. The project is supported by CABE, the Carbon Trust and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).
UK buildings represent some 45% of the UK’s total CO2 emissions. Lack of real world data is a major barrier to carbon reduction. In hosting such data and communicating trends in the database, CarbonBuzz will provide much needed evidence to support policy as well as design and portfolio decisions.
Judit Kimpian, Aedas’ head of sustainability and advanced modelling and CarbonBuzz’s project leader, said:
“With the introduction of multiple readings and capturing actions that lead to changes in energy use over time, users will be able to track changes in a building’s energy consumption against contributing factors from acquisition all the way to end of life.
"Future updates will allow design predictions to be uploaded directly from mainstream analysis software and organisations will be able to benchmark their portfolios interactively and manage CO2 savings online.
"An improved user interface will highlight discrepancies between forecast and actual CO2 emissions and the scale of occupant impact on energy use.”
CarbonBuzz will provide anonymised case studies, documented to industry standards, along with reports on real life trends in the energy consumption of buildings for all major building sectors. It also enables a practice to publish their successes as part of the RIBA’s Carbon Conscious Practice Scheme, the first incentive to promote the value of attributable data in the public domain. The scheme will recognise those electing to publish energy use data through the CarbonBuzz site as a ‘Carbon Conscious Practice’.
