Most countries across the world experienced a summer of record-breaking heat waves. The average temperature in Europe was the highest on record by a margin of 0.4 degrees Celsius the entire summer, according to European climate observation service Copernicus. In mid-July, temperatures in the UK reached over 40 degrees Celsius—a first in British history. Compared to other European nations, however, the UK is unique in its inability to cope with high temperatures. Most buildings are designed to retain heat, and just 5 percent of homes are fitted with some form of air conditioning. So it’s no wonder that during the summer heat waves, workers flocked to offices to escape their stifling work-from-home setups.
But the trend of office workers returning to offices of their own volition is likely to continue, as a blistering summer was followed by a global energy crisis, sending energy prices soaring. Anyone working from home is likely to want to take advantage of employer-sponsored heating. In the UK, where energy prices are now colossal compared to similar economies like France and Italy, 14 percent of Britons plan to spend more time working from the office to reduce home energy bills, with this increasing to almost a quarter among workers aged 18-to-24, according to financial services firm MoneySupermarket. In this scenario, heat-retentive buildings may be an advantage, but not when the heat makes a return next year.
“Even with reduced carbon emissions, we will see occurrences of such high temperatures and the UK will need to adapt,” says Stephen Belcher, the Met Office’s chief scientist. To cope, commercial landlords and architects must figure out sustainable ways to keep buildings at the right temperature, while companies get creative to mitigate the impact of extreme weather on their home workers.
Of course, the easiest solution would be to install air conditioning. But it’s a cursed commodity—more air conditioning units means an increase in energy consumption and more greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere—which in turn pushes up temperatures. By the end of the century, air conditioning could increase the UK’s power consumption by up to 15 percent during the summer. Cooling office buildings is by far the worst offender for energy consumption. Data from the UK government found that the office sector accounts for 51 percent of non-domestic energy consumption for cooling and humidification in the UK, more than any other sector, including health, hospitality and retail.
Swapping our obsession with air conditioning for natural ventilation is one approach. Many corporate workplaces are hermetically sealed, but incorporating operable windows is an often overlooked route to more comfortable conditions. US design firm Gensler is working to future-proof modernist architect Richard Seifert’s 90 Long Acre in Covent Garden with operable windows that will mean 60 percent of the proposed office space will be naturally ventilated. A thrifty way to reduce energy consumption, naturally ventilated offices can halve energy consumption compared to air-conditioned buildings, and save 15 percent on capital costs and 75 percent on maintenance costs.
Passive cooling, which aims to reduce heat gain and increase heat loss, is the holy grail of adapting to climate change sustainably. “This means cooling a place overnight and storing those cooler temperatures in the fabric of the structure,” explains Andrew Lerpiniere, a director at the London-based Webb Yates Engineers. “Buildings made from heavyweight fabrics and with little direct sunlight, like churches, are the best example of comfortable conditions through passive means. The stone stores cooling energy which is radiated from its surface when outside air warms throughout that day.”
In winter, such dense fabrics will retain heat, and temperatures will not dip as much as the outside air. Some heating may be required, but as Lerpiniere points out, there’s a move away from gas boilers to electrically driven heat pumps, the technology for which is improving rapidly.
Achieving the church effect in a commercial building is a monumental challenge. “Without exposed mass and with all the lightweight partitions, ceiling tiles and plasterboard in a typical office building, there’s no way of getting useful cooling energy storage into it,” says Lerpiniere. “Keeping the sun out at the peak of the day would certainly help, although adding external shading to a skyscraper made entirely of glass is a huge job, and would increase the demand for intense lighting inside.”
Lerpiniere believes that passively cooling the late ’80s or early ’90s style of office building stock is near impossible, but newer builds have much more scope for innovation that can withstand future heat waves. Native Land’s office development Arbor, in Bankside Yards, has a smart façade with anti-solar gain blinds, which automatically tilt to reduce solar glare, reducing the need for air conditioning, while BedZED in Mitcham, south London, which houses a mix of office space, homes, a college, and community facilities, is topped with large multicolored wind funnels for passive ventilation. The funnels point into wind to bring fresh air into homes, as stale air moves through a heat exchanger and passes its warmth to the cooler incoming air.
They may look high-tech, but wind catchers (or bagdirs in Arabic) have been used to cool buildings in Iran and the Middle East region for centuries. The city of Yazd in central Iran has hundreds of these four or eight-sided towers—it’s even been dubbed the “City of Wind Catchers.” For an amplified cooling effect, bagdirs are often built in conjunction with qanats, underground channels which transfer water from a well to the surface. Air is drawn down into the qanat where it meets cooler earth and cold water, with the cooled air then drawn up through the wind catcher to increase airflow in the building.
Similar to the ancient qanat and bagdir system, Deloitte’s Amsterdam HQ The Edge, completed in 2014, requires minimal heating and cooling thanks to its aquifer thermal energy storage system. A network of small wires deliver water to and from the building’s subterranean water storage for radiant heating and cooling. During summer months, the building pumps warm water more than 400 feet deep below it, where it sits insulating until winter, when it’s sucked back out for heating.
“Through this, as well as triple glazed windows, insulation, and atriums for natural air flow, we have managed to keep inside air temperatures at 23 or 24 degrees, which for us is a sustainable, normal level,” says Coen van Oostrom, founder and CEO of sustainable real estate developer Edge.
Using algorithms to optimize a building’s heating and cooling is a vital tool for a generation of commercial construction that needs to be both resilient and sustainable. The Edge and Southworks, an office building near Borough Market in London are examples of buildings that implement sensor technology to gain insight into how people move through and use the building with heating, cooling, fresh air, and lighting all IoT integrated. “We can let rooms or even whole floors which aren’t in use to heat up more in summer, which is a major contributor to our sustainability ambitions,” says van Oostrom. “After all, it’s a shame to keep a room cooled that’s not being used.”
Companies can follow simple rules: slowing down fans, for example, if the floor is empty for a long time and it’s afternoon, or utilizing optimization algorithms (“Sunday should be sunny, so we can use photovoltaic panels to cool the space in preparation for the Monday morning rush”) and prediction algorithms (“The time needed to cool down a space on the eastern façade on a sunny summer morning is longer than on a rainy one, so check the weather forecast and adjust the ventilation”), says Miloš Halečka, innovations director at MiddleCap, which is developing Southworks. “This combination of centuries-old knowledge with modern tech is revolutionary for the way we design, build and manage our office spaces.”
We should expect more bursts of sweltering weather in the UK next year. “All buildings currently in development should have passive design features like natural ventilation, natural daylight combined with solar shading, and water features providing evaporative cooling,” says Halečka. “However, climate change is proving so extreme that passive design alone will not be able to provide all of the solutions.”
A multipronged approach of retrofitting old buildings, investing in passive design for new ones, and supporting workers will be necessary as we adjust to climbing temperatures. However, Lerpiniere believes there will always be limitations in what can be done from an engineering point of view. “If you try to design any building for peak heat conditions, which may be only 5 percent of the year, you’re overdesigning,” he says. “I’m in favor of shutting offices down for four weeks in peak summer as they do in France or Italy—we’d hardly be unusual in that.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
