Miles Oglethorpe

Dr Miles Oglethorpe is a president of the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH) and is also a head of Industrial Heritage at Historic Environment Scotland, the national body responsible for the built heritage in Scotland. He has edited, authored and co-authored a number of books and papers relating to industrial heritage, and energy in particular. Of these, his book, Scottish Collieries: An Inventory of the Scottish Coal Industry in the Nationalised Era (2006) is the most significant, containing the fruits of many years’ work on Scotland’s coal industry. He also helped establish Capturing the Energy, an initiative established by the University of Aberdeen, Oil & Gas UK, TOTAL and other partners which is attempting to ensure the achievements of the UK’s offshore oil and gas industries are properly recorded and recognised. 

TICCIH, Historic Environment Scotland

Making our Industrial Past work for our Future in the context of Climate Change 

As Climate Change continues to drive major changes in policy and practice on a global scale, the role of industrial heritage is becoming increasingly important. There remains strong pressure from business interests to clear away the past and start again from a blank canvas, but now there are growing arguments for an alternative approach which re-cycles the carbon already invested in industrial buildings and structures and gives them a second life.  There is also an increasing number of examples that demonstrate the power of industrial heritage to drive sustainable regeneration and re-vitalization schemes across the world. Significantly, this trend is not confined to the most attractive, aesthetically pleasing structures – a wide variety of industrial sites have been imaginatively adapted to a new life and in many cases have helped engineer a vibrant future for previously marginalised communities and areas.
In Scotland, our national heritage body, Historic Environment Scotland, recently published it’s ‘Climate Action Strategy’. At its heart is the ambition to transform the challenge facing us from one in which our heritage is a victim, instead harnessing it and all its attributes in the battle against Climate Change. This paper will argue that industrial heritage is especially well placed to do this. 

Rolf Frischknecht

Dr Rolf Frischknecht holds a master’s degree in civil engineering and has been shaping the development of life cycle assessment in Europe and worldwide for almost 30 years. His activities range from the comprehensive ecoinvent life cycle assessment database to the further development of environmental indicators and assessment methods, such as the ecological scarcity method. He currently acts as the Operating Agent of the IEA EBC Annex 72 „Assessing Life Cycle Related Environmental Impacts Caused by Buildings.“ He founded and owns treeze, a company specialised in life cycle assessment consulting and research, and teaches life cycle assessment at ETH Zurich. In 2020, he was awarded the SETAC edana award for Lifetime Achievement in Life Cycle Assessment. 

The buried giant: construction materials shape the environmental footprint of buildings

The environmental impacts, including those related to greenhouse gas emissions, of the construction and deconstruction of buildings come more and more into focus of governments and professional building owners. In new constructions these so-called embodied impacts are often more important than the environmental impacts during 50 years use phase. How did the environmental impacts caused by construction materials and building technologies and their supply chains change during the past three decades? What might be expected in the future? How did LCA contribute to the past development and how did LCA practice evolve during this period? Finally, are current LCA practices suited to support the transformation of the building stock towards net zero greenhouse gas emissions? 
In a first part, the past as well as the potential future development of the environmental impacts caused by the manufacture of selected key construction materials and their supply chains will be presented. The main measures which lead to lower impacts in the past and which will be needed to further reduce environmental impacts in the future will be named. Current trends will be assessed against their effectiveness to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions of buildings and the built environment.
In a second part the history and evolution of LCI data collection and data management will be discussed. Several aspects will be covered such as information sources, modelling and methodology, environmental impacts (pollutants and resources) covered in the LCIs, IT resources and solutions, and information policies.  

Karsten Voss

Karsten Voss, professor for building physics and technical services at Wuppertal University since 2003. Researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems for 12 years. He works as an expert for the International Energy Agency. Beside a large number of scientific articles, he published books on energy efficient buildings, zero energy buildings and building performance. He was a faculty advisor of “Team Wuppertal” at SDE 2010. Since then, he is actively involved in the continuous development of the format within IEA Annex 74. He is competition director of SDE 2021/22 in Wuppertal, Germany.

Solar Decathlon Europe 21/22 – Experiences and Findings

The Solar Decathlon is a competition for universities from all over the world to design, build and operate small experimental solar powered houses. Its first edition took place in the US in 2002. Since 2010 it is in practice in Europe with four competitions and 65 net zero or net energy plus houses build and tested in 10 disciplines (decathlon). The lecture provides an overview and initial experience and findings from the 22^nd edition of the competition in Wuppertal, Germany. It represents a profiling on densification in the existing urban environmental, resource efficiency and carbon neutral energy supply towards climate neutrality.

Wolfgang Streicher

Wolfgang Streicher is university professor of Energy Efficient Buildings and Renewable Energies at Innsbruck University in Austria. He teaches Building Services Engineering, HVAC, Heat Pumps, Tube Hydraulics, Modelling, Thermodynamics, Energy and Ecology. His current research focus is on development of cost and energy efficient systems solutions for HVAC systems including renewables; energy demand of cities using GIS and bottom-up approaches; hydraulics of complex tube networks; energy efficient systems for cities. He works in these fields since more than 30 years and has coordinated and participated in Austrian institutions as well as the European Commission and the International Energy Agency.

Key note A fossil free future – scenarios for Austria – implications for Europe

If the energy transition completely away from fossil fuels to renewable energies due to climate change and to reduce the dependency from not or semi democratic countries is taken serious, many implications and needed measures have to be faced. In the keynote a general approach with the options reduction of energy demand, generation of renewables within the countries and, if not enough renewable energy is available locally, where could the additional renewable energy be imported from, will be shown. Additionally the question of energy storage is tackled to overcome the timely variation of the production of renewable energy carriers and the demand. The  whole process is shown in detail for the province of Tyrol/Austria, where the possible potential of renewables is compared to the energy need after possible reduction of the energy demand in the whole energy system. The sectors housing, mobility/transportation and industry are included. It will be shown, that the energy efficiency of the whole system needs to be as high as possible and that not only technologic measures are needed but also many other aspects like laws, democracy, mico- and macroeconomics etc. have to be looked at and several dilemmas have to be solved. Concerning the cost it has to be stated that no transition if the energy system will become far more expensive due to the costs of climate change compared to the costs for the energy change, which ranges in about 1 %/GNP.