CarbonBuzz Needs You

There's a correlation -- a verifiable, calculable, measurable one -- between the energy required to construct and maintain a building and the amount of CO2 it emits into the environment. The brains behind the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) came to this realization quite early on, which led to the launch of CarbonBuzz.org.

CarbonBuzz is a carbon-management resource portal, representing cross-collaboration between architects and engineers. Global architecture consulting firm Aedas helped champion the site. "Anyone can use CarbonBuzz," declares its creators. "Architects and engineers can use it to manage their project energy use and emissions from design through to completion and beyond."

If you'd like to use CarbonBuzz, you register first to get your log in and password. Afterward, you enter project details and building features that affect energy use (heating and cooling mechanisms, for example).

The site lets you track and compare projected energy use and actual results. Currently, many energy analysis and building performance software products let you predict anticipated energy use, but these projections are seldom compared to post-occupancy results. Some unpredictable post-occupancy factors, such as occupants leaving lights on longer than necessary in office buildings, have been identified as leading contributors to the discrepancy between projected and actual energy use in buildings.

You may manage your project without making them public, or, if you can get permission from your client, you may publish your project data so others can benefit from the knowledge base. Currently, the site houses about 159 projects; 10 are accessible to the public.

CarbonBuzz is a voluntary benchmarking program, not a certification process, but if it becomes the standard platform for managing CO2 emission, architects and engineers will have a greater sample pool to draw from in the future to make critical decisions about building performance.

Judit Kimpian, CarbonBuzz's Project Leader and Aedas' head of Sustainability and Advanced Modeling, said, "With the introduction of multiple readings and capturing actions that lead to changes in energy use over time, users will be able to track changes in a building's energy consumption against contributing factors from acquisition all the way to end of life. Future updates will allow design predictions to be uploaded directly from mainstream analysis software and organizations will be able to benchmark their portfolios interactively and manage CO₂ savings online. An improved user interface will highlight discrepancies between forecast and actual CO₂ emissions and the scale of occupant impact on energy use."

The site has just received a three-year match funding grant from the Technology Strategy Board (UK). The additional £750,000 will go along way in advancing the online resource as an authoritative database for CO₂ emissions of buildings.

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