Driving measurable change for sustainable buildings and cities
Authors: Farrell Michelle 
Published: April 2017

Performance analysis is, and will increasingly become more so, a vital component in designing truly sustainable buildings, eco-cities and communities; it provides a measurable understanding of the impact of different strategies on energy consumption and other environmental metrics. Analysis software allows designers to ‘virtually’ test the feasibility of different energy saving strategies and new technologies and facilitate low-energy/low-carbon designs. It also allows quantification of savings against targets, plus measurement and verification for operational and control optimisation. It takes into consideration climate, use, design and systems operation. The requirement to quantify, justify and optimise design decisions in an informed and sustainable way is becoming increasingly important. Performance analysis exposes and cuts through greenwash to get to the heart of creating high-performance buildings that are also economically viable. With the rise in the use of green rating systems such as GSAS, LEED and Estidama and the need to meet government energy/carbon reduction targets, there has been a major shift towards Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) using performance analysis tools. This is widely considered as the route towards delivering energy efficiency in today's buildings. For almost two decades, IES have been pushing the ethos of integrated design and incorporation of performance analysis right from the earliest new-build and retrofit stages as the route to achieving truly sustainable, low-energy structures. Consequently, we find ourselves today still working at the leading edge of building science, investigating how analysis plays a vital role in cutting through greenwash to deliver measurable sustainability, be it designing or analysing a product range, a regulatory system, a building or entire communities/eco-cities. Cities may be the major polluters, but they are substantially more efficient than having the same population dispersed over that wide area. Energy, water and other services can be provided more efficiently and their use can be minimised. Our sustainable future is in eco-cities that use technology in a smart way, incorporating real-time dynamic control to optimise the use of energy, water and other resources. Performance analysis and predictive interrogation of data will play a key role in this. An emerging vision is that each building would be designed or refurbished using state-of-the-art 3D simulation to quantify, optimize and verify its performance. The building simulation model would then be used to commission and subsequently control the building. However, in order for it to be a true eco-city, it would not be enough for each building to be independently efficient. There would need to be a master system to optimize city-wide energy and water consumption in coordination with the relevant utilities. This session will emphasise the importance of the role that integrated performance analytics has in creating truly sustainable buildings by taking the audience through some real-life case studies. It will also explore the role that performance analytics can play in creating sustainable cities for the future.