Tristan Kershaw Speaks at the Fowey Renewable Energy Efficiency Event (May 2012)
The Centre's Tristan Kershaw spoke at an event in Fowey aimed at promoting renewable energy in Cornwall.
Fowey Renewable Energy Enterprise (FREE) is seeking consent for seven community-owned solar electric installations, including one at Squires Field triangle where solar panels would be mounted above parked cars. More information is available at on the FREE Website
Montgomery Primary School is UK's First PassivHaus School (March 2012)
Montgomery Primary School has become the first PassivHaus Certified school in the UK. The certification is a result of almost three years collaboration between the Centre and architects, NPS.
The construction of the school represents a landmark for school design in the UK. In addition to being the UK's first PassivHaus school, Montgomery will be the first school in the UK to be "Climate Change Ready".
The initial design was modelled under different weather conditions, to see, for example, whether or not the school would overheat during the summer months. However, to achieve its “Climate Change Ready” status, the design went one stage further by examining how the design would respond to future climate change.
To do this, the Centre used its probabilistic future weather files that had been produced the EPRSC-funded Prometheus Project. Since their creation, the Centre’s weather files have been used on over £4bn of construction projects in the UK alone. The role of the weather files in the design of Montgomery was to ensure low energy use for the building and to provide a comfortable environment for pupils and teachers for the lifetime of the building.
For more information about the use of future weather files in Montgomery School, or any other aspect of building design please contact the Centre.
Centre help the TSB to create future weather files (Dec 2011)
The Centre are assisting the Technology Strategy Board to create probabilistic future weather files. Building designers are using data created by the Centre to predict how their buildings are going to perform. The data helps building designers to predict how hot it might get inside the building during the summer months and how much energy each building might use under future climate
Penryn College Monitoring Complete (Dec 2011)
Monitoring of Penryn College is now complete. The results of the project show that the internal environment in the new building appears to perform relatively well. Measurements of thermal performance, ventilation, lighting efficacy and illuminance, fossil fuel and water consumption, and reverberation control and sound insulation vertically between spaces were taken. The Centre identified an number of aspects that could be improved in future design. Areas for improvement included: daylighting provision (owing to deep-plan rooms with no rooflights or lightwells), electricity consumption (probably owing to the profusion of electronic devices, coupled with poor standards of occupant control), and sound insulation horizontally, which appears to be compromised by ventilation stacks.
