As the United States takes its firsts steps to rejoin the Paris Agreement and countries move to update their national carbon-cutting plans ahead of the annual Conference of the Parties, the need to accelerate these emission cuts has become a key discussion point.
Buildings currently account for the largest share of global energy-related carbon emissions. In light of this, Asite, a digital transformation platform with significant experience in the construction sector, published its latest report exploring the role of the industry in the advancement of net-zero carbon goals.
The report establishes the importance of retrofitting existing building at scale, paying particular attention to the technologies that can expedite this and providing insight into the burgeoning role of digital twins in mitigating carbon emissions.
A Global Effort
While climate change is undoubtedly a global issue, the journey toward decarbonization must take into consideration regional disparities with regard to the built environment.
In many developing countries, more than half of the buildings needed by 2050 are yet to be built, lessening their retrofit needs. For this reason, more built-up regions, like the United States and Europe, where 80% of the homes that people will inhabit in 2050 are already built but predate modern energy standards, have a bigger role to play.
Barriers to Overcome
Despite increased awareness surrounding energy inefficiencies, the uptake of decarbonization and retrofit activities is low. Not a single one of the world’s largest and most advanced countries will achieve the mission of the Paris Agreement under their current trajectory.
The obstacles limiting widescale retrofitting range in complexity from issues with financing and supply chain capacity to skill gaps and logistics. While some progress has been made to overcome these obstacles, it is clear they still require additional and immediate action.
Transformative Technologies
Digital engineering, including the tools and processes it encompasses, is identified as the primary solution to reducing carbon emissions and overcome existing obstacles.
The greater network interconnectedness that these technologies allow is imperative to a global approach. For this reason, smart buildings and smart grid integration are cited as vital to reducing our environmental impact and “future-proofing” societies beyond 2050 targets.
Here, the deployment of affordable IoT technology, such as sensors and actuators, can gather real-time activity data that can then be analyzed and measured to produce useable insights and support end-user energy management.
The rise of the circular economy and keeping products and materials in use is also imperative. To establish long-term circularity in the built environment, we need quality, open ingredient data on what materials are in a building (i.e. material passports).
Computational technologies, such as BIM and Geographical Information Systems, would allow for the modeling and analysis of building stock in terms of material composition and the creation of a public material register to optimize the retrofit process.
Digital Twins: The Future of Retrofitting
Upon analysis of these technologies, it is concluded that digital twins offer the most comprehensive resource for retrofitting at scale.
The report demonstrates how the consolidation of the physical and digital world and move to turn everyday data into value is most prevalent in digital twins, which offer a sophisticated amalgamation of multiple technologies.
Digital twins integrate data from several sources to provide an understanding of real-world conditions. Digital twin technologies, alongside AI and analytical software supported by cloud infrastructure, have put the industry in a position to transform this data into actionable insights in the form of perception, prediction, recommendations and simulation.
This approach allows the industry to not only achieve its goals but future-proof buildings beyond 2050 decarbonization targets. In an effort to advise the industry on its next steps, the report argues that to extract value from these technologies and resources and create a sustainable and resilient built environment, the industry needs to operate holistically and collaboratively.
Ultimately, the industry must expand its technical infrastructure to enable data connectivity and a bi-directional flow of information to connect real-world assets to digital twins. A global strategy based on extensive data analytics must be enacted to support global energy transformation and drive the decarbonization of the built environment.
To read more about how digital twins can help the construction industry meet their decarbonization goals, read Asite’s latest report, Smart Retrofitting: The Key to Decarbonizing the Built Environment.
