'Housing Retrofit: Necessity & Avoiding Unintended Consequences' Talk by Dr Sofie Pelsmakers
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- Опубліковано 21 лип 2024
- "Refurbishing the Existing Housing Stock: Priorities & unintended consequences" - Talk by Dr Sofie Pelsmakers, Lecturer at Sheffield School of Architecture and Co-Founder of Architecture for Change at 'The Future of Buildings - A Retrofit Showcase' event hosted by the Carbon Neutral University Network on November 9th at the University of Sheffield.
Content:
There are around 26 million dwellings in the UK and around 2 million non-domestic buildings, the majority of which will still exist in 2050. At present, these dwellings represent around 27% of the UK’s CO2 emissions and their poorly insulated fabric means they are difficult and expensive to heat, leading to some 25,000 to 30,000 yearly cold-related excess deaths in the UK. By simply refurbishing to much higher insulation and airtightness standards, this would reduce the operational energy required just to heat our buildings by more than 60%. Dr Sofie Pelsmakers, lecturer in Environmental Design at the Sheffield School of architecture gives a brief overview of retrofit issues in the UK.
Speaker:
Dr Sofie Pelsmakers, Lecturer at Sheffield School of Architecture and Co-Founder of Architecture for Change
Dr Sofie Pelsmakers is a chartered architect with over 15 years of experience in designing, building and teaching sustainable architecture. Sofie authored ‘The Environmental Design Pocketbook’ (RIBA Publishing), a comprehensive publication which distils environmental science, legislation and guidance into one easy to use single source. This publication received commendation by the RIBA for ‘Outstanding Practice-located Research’ (2012) and was ‘Highly Commended’ for the UKGBC/PRP ‘Rising Star award’ 2013. Sofie is part-time lecturer at Sheffield School of Architecture, where she co-leads an MSc in Sustainable Architecture and is Head of Research at ECD Architects. She is currently co-authoring a Performance gap book with Judit Kimpian and Hattie Hartman. Sofie finished her PhD at UCL on the retrofit of the existing Victorian housing stock, in particular in-situ heat-flow measuring of suspended ground floors. She developed in-situ measuring techniques and undertook pilot studies to investigate the effect of insulation interventions and closing of air-bricks on floor heat loss and floor void conditions.
Very good presentation. I find it interesting how reluctant the UK is to replace old housing stock with something newer and built better. Improving liveability of the cities in the process.
This is an excellent brief which highlights some of the realities of retrofitting our housing stock. It is far more complex than simply chucking a few more layers of insulation in the roof and converting from a gas combi boiler to an air-source heat pump. Get it wrong and we destroy our housing stock. The costs are eye watering and this is anything but easy. It would be refreshing for politicians and environmentalists on all sides to stop grand-standing and have a proper informed debate about the costs, benefits and pitfalls.
Question: she said brexit Has happened! And a video is 5 years old,from 2017...
Very interesting lecture.
My question is: why must renewables be the last thing we think about? For example, why shouldn't I replace my has boiler with a heat pump and self generate half the electricity I need with solar panels. This will also result in a 75% energy use reduction without extensive retrofit of the house.
The primary purpose of prioritising retrofits over the adoption of renewables is to first reduce the amount of energy demand. This way, the energy required from the renewables also drastically reduces. So in theory, it's important to improve the building envelope to avoid heat loss especially during the colder months (by using natural/low-carbon materials) so that you only require reduced amount of energy to keep warm. In practice, you may find that you do not need to adopt any renewables for heating at all because of your 'warm' building envelope (blanket).
There are two answers to your question
Firstly, heat pumps work best at a lower temperature (vs gas boilers) so do not work efficiently in poorly insulated homes, so it is necessary to first well insulate a home, in order for the heat pump to operate in a way that will be cost competitive with gas heating.
Secondly, as was mentioned in the lecture, at times when the sun is not shining to give you solar electricity, the UK electrical power grid today simply does not have even half the capacity required, to heat every house in the UK, at current consumption levels, even using efficient heat pumps. It will be much cheaper overall, for both homeowners and the UK as a whole, to reduce heating energy consumption by insulating our homes, than to at least double the capacity of the electrical grid, and build many new power stations, as ultimately we would all have to pay for this grid upgrade, in our electricity bills.
So it's not a case of do we fit insulation or heat pumps, we need to do both together or it doesn't work, either for the individual homeowner or the UK as a whole. Solar is a bonus but not a solution on it's own.
I think you should name the names of denier politicians as all voters should have this information.