Buildings consume a lot of energy

As more and more of the world's population move to cities we face a huge challenge. How to provide enough energy to supply the built urban environment.

We are all by now familiar with the energy tri-lemma - how to provide secure, cost effective and clean energy to meet growing demand as urban populations expand.

Distributed energy solutions, where energy is generated onsite, is undoubtedly part of the solution (especially where it takes pressure off an increasingly challenged utility grid freeing up gas / electricity for central generation). In reality most buildings simply can't produce all of the energy they need.

You can only generate a certain amount of energy from a finite amount of roof space (unless you resort to extreme measures - credit to the wonderful Bullitt Center in Seattle). Given that half of all energy is actually used for heating one solution is to fit solar thermal onto a roof. Not only is it more efficient than PV, it also has a far greater impact on scope 1 CO2 emissions (that is those generated onsite) where a building uses gas or heating oil as its source of heat.

There are a number of cutting edge buildings that actually generate more energy than they consume (eg Active Office from Specific at Swansea University - https://specific.eu.com). One great way of increasing the amount of energy from a limited space is to deploy a hybrid solution that will generate both heat and power. This could be an efficient CHP plant, but that does mean burning more fossil fuels and does nothing for those important scope 1 emissions.

A really good solution is to put the limited roof space to better use and install PVT (photovoltaic-thermal) solar collectors. VirtuPVT from Naked Energy is highly efficient and versatile. More energy is collected per square metre of available space than any other technologies with commensurate cost savings, return on investment and, crucially, CO2 emissions reduction (especially scope 1).

So if growing a bigger roof really isn't an option think outside of the box and take a look at a solution in a tube....