by jbs081010 a3 — August 11, 2010—CarbonBuzz, the U.K. architectural and building services engineering community’s carbon management scheme that 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 and 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 U.K. and abroad.
Project partners funding over 50 percent 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).
Buildings represent some 45 percent of the U.K.’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, say the founders.
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 organizations 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 anonymized 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 RIBA’s Carbon Conscious Practice Scheme, the first incentive to promote the value of attributable data in the public domain, says the organization. The program will recognize those electing to publish energy use data through the CarbonBuzz site as a Carbon Conscious Practice.
