{"id":45954,"date":"2018-08-28T10:33:42","date_gmt":"2018-08-28T09:33:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbctoday.co.uk\/news\/?p=45954"},"modified":"2022-10-19T15:27:42","modified_gmt":"2022-10-19T14:27:42","slug":"first-energy-positive-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbctoday.co.uk\/news\/energy-news\/first-energy-positive-office\/45954\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning buildings into power stations: The UK\u2019s first energy-positive office"},"content":{"rendered":"

Developing low carbon, affordable buildings is a key challenge for the construction industry. What if technology could be harnessed to create power-generating, \u201cenergy-positive\u201d structures? Dr Justin Searle, technology director of the SPECIFIC Innovation & Knowledge Centre at Swansea University, discusses a project that is doing just that<\/h2>\n

Buildings currently account for around 40% of UK energy consumption. However, a new office, just opened in Swansea, points the way to a very different future.<\/p>\n

Why not design buildings to be power stations that can generate, store and release their own energy?<\/p>\n

If it sounds like science fiction, come down to Swansea, where we\u2019ve just opened a building that shows it can work. We call it the Active Office<\/a>. It is the UK\u2019s first energy-positive office, capable of generating more solar energy than it consumes over the annual cycle.<\/p>\n

The Active Office was designed by SPECIFIC<\/a>, a national Innovation & Knowledge Centre led by Swansea University, with their key industrial partners, Tata Steel<\/a>, NSG Group<\/a> and AkzoNobel<\/a>. SPECIFIC is leading change in construction, helping industry partners take new products to market by integrating them into new systems and demonstrating that they work.<\/p>\n

We built the Active Office on Swansea University\u2019s Bay Campus, with construction \u2013 from concept to completion \u2013 taking us just eight months. Much of the work was carried out elsewhere and then assembled on site.<\/p>\n

The individual technologies we used in the Active Office are impressive, from an integrated solar roof to battery storage.<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s most significant is the fact that they all work together in one integrated system, generating, storing and releasing solar energy for heat and electricity.<\/p>\n

The office has smart systems, including wireless access points and data infrastructure to support predictive operation, Internet of Things devices and smart building sensors. Extensive energy monitoring identifies sources and sinks of both electrical and thermal energy, providing information on how the energy is being distributed within the building<\/p>\n

Significant too is the fact that all the technologies used are already commercially available, using existing supply chains. There is no reason why these could not be used on any new building.<\/p>\n

The Active Office is also demonstrating how an energy-resilient community could work. It has been designed to share energy with another building next door, the Active Classroom, which was the UK\u2019s first energy-positive classroom.<\/p>\n

The Classroom, recently named Project of the Year by RICS Wales, has shown that the \u201cbuildings as power stations\u201d concept works. In its first year of operation, it generated more than one-and-a-half times the solar energy it consumed.<\/p>\n

Now that the Office is up and running, the two Active Buildings will able to share energy with each other, and with electric vehicles via three charging points. So what we have here are not just individual buildings, but a demonstration of an energy-resilient solar-powered community.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s look at the individual technologies in use on the Active Office:<\/p>\n