UK based engineers’ association CIBSE is known for its high standards and strong reputation, so taking the helm of this outfit was quite the challenge, you’d think.
Yet for Ruth Carter, who took over as chief executive officer five years ago, after a varied career that included an executive role with London’s Telegraph newspaper, there are all the indications it’s been a dream run.
Joining the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers, she said, was an opportunity to delve into meaningful work at a time when she could see the planet needed all the help it could get.
Because if there is one thing that members of the CIBSE take seriously, it’s their commitment to good environmental outcomes.
In an interview at the Fullerton Hotel in Sydney recently, Carter noted this 24,000 strong organisation had grown by 20 per cent over the past five years and was now in 194 countries, while managing to downplay at least this part of its ambitions.
“Embodied carbon is the sleeping giant. Overall, 40 per cent of carbon in our world comes from embodied carbon.”
“We will never be the largest [and] we don’t wish to be the largest,” she told The Fifth Estate.
“We are the world’s leading providers of knowledge and guidance on building performance, building safety and decarbonisation – those are the three hottest things on the planet at the moment.”
“[Our members] care about energy usage. They care about wellness. So that’s our building performance, building safety goes without saying, and decarbonisation.”
Commitment to excellence and purpose are clearly their own reward, she might have added. But to get there, engineers have to be acutely tuned to emerging challenges, such as the long term viability of buildings.
How will buildings be managed and maintained, and are they being designed for today or the future?
“[Our members] care about energy usage. They care about wellness. So that’s our building performance, building safety goes without saying, and decarbonisation.”
“We all know climate change is real, whether we like it or not. We’re talking about 2030 [a key target for decarbonisation], that’s minutes away. We should be designing for 2040, 2050, and that whole reimagining of what building performance will look like, I think, will be a real challenge.”
Another big challenge is the emerging data centre behemoth.
The biggest issue is that 60 per cent of carbon used in a data centre is embodied carbon,” Carter says.
“While servers in data centres burn energy, the kit used to store, manage, and cool data has huge amounts of embodied carbon.
“Embodied carbon is the sleeping giant. Overall, 40 per cent of carbon in our world comes from embodied carbon.”
Carter points out that while the nation is moving towards solar power, EVs and electrification of the grid, the embodied carbon of components is often “offset” by having “other countries build that for us”.
The working environment
Big changes are also emerging in our working habits.
What people want from their buildings now is different from what they would have accepted 10 years ago, Carter says.
She points to smart buildings, with blinds that respond to sunlight, or a scan of your pass that advises the building to prepare your workspace, make sure you are logged on, and even change the temperature around the desk according to your preferences.
“Engineers don’t tend to think about net zero. Net zero is the destination, engineers are worried about the journey [and] decarbonisation is the journey.”
“I’ve seen a number of desks where cooling and heating are designed for the individual.”
Technology and AI will streamline many of these design details, she says, and slash the time taken to perfect them. Taking the legwork off the engineer will allow them to focus on more creative solutions and help generate better results than they could on their own.
Some jobs may be threatened, but others will open up.
Young people are our future
Carter is clearly energised by young people – CIBSE’s Young Engineers Network in particular; they are some of the most “hungry, ambitious, passionate people”, and making buildings better and wellness “really matters to young people,” but also “it’s their planet” and “you’ve got to be passionate about it.”
“Engineers don’t tend to think about net zero. Net zero is the destination, engineers are worried about the journey [and] decarbonisation is the journey.”
The cost of things
Solutions are not the problem, but how to afford them can be, Carter says. So too “how we get government legislation to make it imperative that it is done.
“If you think about the NABERS rating initiative here, the government mandating that everybody has to have a NABERS rating on their buildings, that’s a magnificent tool, and that’s encouraging people to understand their energy performance.
“If you have NABERS rating on your energy bill over 10 years, that’s significant, and that’s driven by the ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ concept.”
But the most important concept of all in getting new engineering solutions across the line is in funding them.
This is a critical component of change, she notes, and it’s handy to know that engineering led solutions are more cost-effective.
“Nobody ever lost their job for taking the lowest quote”.
– with Bevin Liu