UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard: Pilot Version Launched today 24 September 2024
UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard: Pilot Version Launched today 24 September 2024
In May 2022 (Friday 13th to be precise), a project was launched to establish a UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard (NZCBS). It was conceived to face up to the huge and urgent challenge for the country’s journey to net zero by 2050, a transition set in law: what does a net zero built environment look like in 2050 and how do we get there.
Even since then, the context for the UK’s energy transition has markedly changed. The new government has set more aggressive targets for the build out of renewable energy supplies in order “to deliver clean power by 2030 and accelerate to net zero”. For those working on net zero, it’s notable that climate and energy expert and former chief executive of the Climate Change Committee, Chris Stark, is leading the control centre tasked with delivering this mission (1).
At the same time, electricity and gas network planning is to be brought under one roof, when the new independent and publicly owned organisation National Energy System Operator (NESO) launches on Tuesday 1st October with a mission to achieve the clean energy transition, support the UK’s energy security and help to keep bills down in the long term (2).
Meanwhile, the review of electricity market arrangements (REMA) is making significant progress (3). In summary, the critical pieces for the transition on the supply side are all falling into place, in line with what has long been prophesied by National Grid ESO’s highly respected and much followed since 2011 Future Energy Scenarios (4).
But what about the energy demand side, specifically that from the UK’s built environment and its construction and property sectors which are linked to about 40% of the UK’s GHG emissions (5)?
Arguably, the most intriguing dilemma for the built environment net zero transition is what should be the balance between embodied and operational carbon. How much material resource should be ploughed into making new and particularly existing buildings more energy efficient and grid responsive, but thereby using up more of our finite, indeed meagre 1.5°C carbon budget on improvement of the building stock? With renewable energy supply predicted to grow so rapidly, perhaps the stock’s energy demands will not need to be cut as sharply as previously envisaged to achieve the so-called Paris-proof balance between energy supply and demand first coined by the Dutch GBC in 2019 and picked up soon after by the UKGBC in its Net Zero Carbon Buildings Framework Definition and the associated energy performance targets for commercial offices (6).
What has been missing until now is the inclusion of the embodied carbon requirements of new buildings and retrofits, as well as for ongoing end-of-life replacement of building components and equipment as the critical third dimension of the net zero solution space. There is no single right answer, but the NZCBS has asked a lot of the right questions and undertaken more detailed and more granular bottom-up analysis at sector level, using more mature data especially for the embodied carbon required for new buildings and retrofits to different levels of whole building operational energy outcomes. It has emerged after two years of this exhaustive work with a comprehensive set of limits and targets for the industry to stress test during a Pilot phase of the Standard’s development during 2025. In parallel next year “verification administrators” will be put in place so that by 2026 the first net zero building certifications should be being celebrated. It is important to realise that a critical part of the required evidence pack will be a building’s actual energy use when occupied, verified by measurements over a full 12 month period.
It is tempting to sign off with that exciting thought, but it should be noted that many issues remain to be resolved during the pilot stage. For example:
- What is the definition of a building, where is the “system boundary”? Our built environment is often geospatially complex.
- Can delineation be introduced so that the responsibilities and net zero achievements of building owners and building occupiers can be recognised separately where they are not one and the same party which is the case for the majority of non-domestic buildings and over a third of all homes.
- The NZCBS is more sophisticated than any other real estate energy and carbon categorisation framework but is still based on the principal that a fixed EUI operational energy limit constitutes a level playing field for all buildings in any sector, but this defies the logic created by the diversity of occupiers. Surely NABERS UK ratings should be allowed as a fairer ‘deemed to satisfy’ pathway for offices to demonstrate compliance with the operational energy efficiency requirements of the Standard. This option was central to the UKGBC’s pioneering limit setting for commercial offices back in 2019 because NABERS allows for the different intensities of use of the potentially multiple occupiers of a commercial office building. It seems perverse for the NZCBS to communicate (via fixed EUIs) that lower intensity buildings will find it a lot easier to comply with the operational energy aspect of the standard than higher intensity buildings. Why incentivise spreading high intensity activities across more space, when that produces a higher carbon outcome nationally. The launch of the NZCBS invites pilot projects to explore the “equivalence” of limits set by NABERS ratings and EUIs, but one cannot avoid the reality that a building with a higher density of occupants working longer hours will use more energy per m2, even if it creates a lower carbon outcome for a given level of economic activity.
Across society we are seeking to address the challenges of the transition to a low carbon economy and we, at Verco, are committed to accelerating this with our mission to “make a material difference to global carbon targets, enabling governments and corporate leaders to make the right decisions for sustainable growth.” We have been involved in the NZCBS’s development from the very outset and welcome the launch of the pilot, to ground the standard in the complexity of the real world. There are still questions to be answered and we look forward to working with our clients and peers across the industry to address these over time.
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