Speakers
- Monica Mateo Garcia from Birmingham City University – Householder Experience on Future Homes
- Alex Wrigglesworth from Skilled Mapping – Thermal Imaging for Retrofit
- Richard Bubb from the Sustainable Housing Action Partnership – Starting on the Retrofit Journey
Background
Sustainability West Midlands in partnership with the Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands convenes the Innovative Zero Carbon Working Group (IZCWG) and its associated quarterly meetings, where a cross-sector of stakeholders come together to share good practice and build cross-sector collaborative opportunities around low carbon innovation.
Event
The need to vastly reduce demand is implicit in all conversations about decarbonising the energy grids. Reducing the need for heat and electricity in the home will also lead to multiple other social, economic and environmental benefits as well as cost savings for individuals and society. Despite the obvious advantages of decarbonising homes, doing this at any scale has proved a tough nut to crack. Householders interact with new technologies in (technically) unexpected ways; the need to retrofit and how best to go about it is fiendishly difficult to communicate; and trying to plan the retrofit of a home and find suppliers can be almost overwhelming for householders. We were excited to address these issues at the Working Group Event.
For this meeting, we were hosted by Mott MacDonald in Birmingham, where Luke Strickland also shared insights into the company’s Net Zero journey.
We also had Dr. Monica Mateo-Garcia from BCU sharing insights into the Householder Experience of Future Homes. She introduced us to Project 80, a project that is set to build homes with 80% less carbon emissions.
Alex Wrigglesworth enlightened us on Thermal Imaging for Retrofit. His company Skilled Mapping is creating what could be the most advanced thermal mapping system in the world.
Lastly, Richard Bubb talked about Data-driven Retrofit, posing thought-provoking questions about applying innovation to navigate the complexities of the retrofit system.
Besides the wonderful and inshigtful presentations from our speakers, we were thrilled to find out that this event resulted in at least 12 new collaboration opportunities and a volunteering opportunity.
Further information
If you are interested in joining our Innovative Zero Carbon Working Group, or any of the other working groups under Innovation Alliance for the West Midlands, you can learn more, see our current members, and sign up through our IZCWG page.
