Sharing Anglo-American Best Practice

The UCL Environment Institute’s two-day Anglo – American Symposium (24-25 Feb 2011): Sustainable Energy Management and the Built  Environment. Sharing Anglo-American Best Practice was time worthwhile spent. Organised with the support of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office Science and Innovation Network (Huston Office) and UK Government Foresight, it was an invitation-only event which gather over 30 UK and US academics and practitioners concerned with energy in buildings and the built environment. 

The first day of the event focused on ‘energy in buildings’ and was solemnly opened by Professor Sir John Beddington, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. Following a wiz-through the current UK and European energy policy context (presented by Yvonne Rydin of UCL) and its US counterpart (summed up by Rob Petterson of University of Texas at Austin), the floor was open to discussions.

Contributions highlighted the diversity of forces at work in driving energy policy in the two contexts: while in Europe and UK policy has been encouraged and supported by both the European Commission (EU executive) and national government through a wide range of more or less integrated policy documents and legislative pieces, in the US, general business (the economy) has been driven climate change and energy policy as a result of US’ reliance on national coal reserves and relied on relatively patchy state initiatives.

Discussions also debated the UK’s current Localism agenda and raised questions of whether the increasing diversity of approaches at local level could hamper uncertainty for private developers and business, a limiting factor for their involvement; whether the ‘fragmentation’ implied by the Localism agenda should be somehow ‘integrated’ under a ‘national framework’ or ‘standards; and whether ‘local’ is not ‘too local’ when taking into consideration wider sustainability goals.

In the afternoon, the UK’s representatives, Tadj Oreszczyn and Alexi Marmot of UCL, and their American counterparts, Jin Wen of Drexel University and Steve Selkowitz of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, focused on buildings giving us presentations on the key policy and research issues in the two contexts. A number of issues were noted:

• we are moving towards an electric future, with energy policy rapidly moving toward a clearer future, as a result governments and international growing understanding;
• available technologies have not changed much since the 1970s; and
• the R&D has been moving lately away from technology to people and changes in behaviours.

The second day of the symposium focused on the built environment and wider scale of cities. The day kicked off with a presentation given by Lorna Walker of LWC and Sheffield University, which undertook an overview of the British efforts to move forward an urban agenda, including its preoccupation for energy and climate change within the built environment. Seth Schutlz of Clinton Foundation presented next some of their innovative pilot projects under the Climate Positive Development Programme: 17 projects, focusing on private developers and GHG emissions, were spread across 6 continents and sought to employ a ‘common carbon metric’.

During the second part of the morning two presentations were given: Michael Newman of Texas A&M University and Allan Shearer of University of Texas at Austin. Michael posed the question of whether buildings should create energy rather than use energy and advocated integrated infrastructure networks, while Allan considered the social anthropology of energy use.

The event was wrapped up by a round table discussion touching on issues such as opportunities for scaling up and the general public which has not been fully engaged so far despite numerous efforts. The day concluded with an afternoon tour for US visitors of two major British Land commercial developments in London in order to explore their sustainability dimensions.

Catalina Turcu, UCL

4 March 2011