Turning risk into opportunity for net zero higher education estates

By Phil Clempson, Director at Turner & Townsend

In today’s higher education sector there are ever-growing ambitions and demand to transition complex estates to a net-zero footing. Something which is becoming increasingly apparent within Birmingham and surrounding cities.

Estate teams across the region are busy forming the net-zero strategies their senior leadership teams and investors can buy into. The success of this endeavour hinges on wider behavioural and technical change throughout the supply chain, and the ability to battle pressures from rising costs.

A successful strategy will incorporate the flexibility to adapt to external threats, with clear channels to report and justify these changes to senior leaders.

In this article I look at how to navigate these challenges and turn risk into opportunity – delivering sustainable estates throughout Birmingham that foster world-class academic excellence.

Net-zero buildings are at a premium

Higher education estates face a scarce supply of net-zero built assets, often competing with large corporates to secure these. This makes a sequential approach crucial, ensuring that critical decisions are made at the appropriate point in design and construction of new builds and refurbishments, and in the procurement process.

Turner & Townsend’s recently launched embodied carbon calculator can help teams evaluate the carbon footprint of projects from an early design stage, covering cradle to practical completion of the product and construction process.?

For any new build assets, estate teams should understand the types of uses that their buildings might accommodate in future, so these potential uses can be baked into design.

Universities also own and are responsible for many existing assets which inevitably contribute to their carbon emissions, as the fabric of each building plays a key role in the energy required for heating or cooling. An integrated decarbonisation masterplan must ensure money and energy are used efficiently on a longitudinal basis. Benchmarking, modelling and tracking carbon throughout the lifecycle of existing assets and planned maintenance can contribute incrementally to the ultimate net-zero target.

High quality offsets come at a price

There is growing awareness of the need to measure and ‘cost’ carbon. Higher education providers need to prepare for carbon to get a lot more expensive as demand to achieve net zero heats up.

The current cost of carbon is around ￡70 per tonne according to the UK Green Building Council (page 28, UKGBC 2021), however this could increase to over ￡120 per tonne or more by the end of this decade.

Many estate teams are using offsetting as a means to drive down carbon costs for their assets, given that a number of factors – from the green credentials of available materials to the operation of the energy grid – are largely beyond their control, at least in the near term. The increasing demand for carbon offsets is increasing their financial cost, which is expected to peak in 2025 – 2030.

Given these costs, higher education providers can’t rely on offsetting as a silver bullet and must keep up momentum on driving down operational carbon. Combining multiple power sources will assist in this process. Improving energy networks, such as upgrading from standard boiler systems to hydrogen fuel networks could be a critical adaptation.

Rising energy prices require robust planning

These challenges are made tougher because they come against the backdrop of more traditional cost pressures. All higher education providers need to be thinking about how they will manage elevated energy prices going forward, through careful planning of their energy efficiency measures.

Across large estates in other sectors, some organisations are cost-effectively driving these energy savings via their third-party facilities manager (FM). FMs are well equipped with access to the data, skills and scalability needed to deliver efficiency improvements (for example optimising plant, equipment and operations) across many sites.?

Longer-term, storing information and managing data will be the enabler of future transformation. Embedding a broad range of data into digital or?BIM?models, including materials specifications and?energy?performance data, will help provide future occupants with a way to breathe new life into buildings in the future.

Emissions reporting requirements are more rigorous than ever

There is also a practical rationale for larger higher education estates, in the form of reporting commitments. Some of these providers are required to report their emissions through their annual reports, under the Government’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) process, since they meet criteria for corporate form and size.

This includes an expectation now to report on scope 3 carbon emissions (covering indirect emissions that occur throughout an organisation’s value chain). Setting up to accurately report on these associated emissions cannot occur overnight given the complex matrix of suppliers involved throughout the value chain, however estate teams need to quickly cut through this complexity.

Data is often collated from too many different sources and systems without effective integration. Estate teams therefore need to establish a standard playbook for how data is recorded and where.

There are wider benefits to this beyond carbon reporting too. This should be embraced as an opportunity to enhance data throughout the value chain and identify areas for performance improvement. The key to success is ensuring that new systems and procedures are rigorously briefed to suppliers throughout the value chain to avoid working at cross purposes and establish basic rules of engagement. Contracts with incentivisation should be considered to encourage continuous improvement.

As the sector homes-in on reaching net zero, the scale and complexity of the challenge is becoming clearer. Success relies on taking a proactive approach: establishing a regime for evaluating carbon use and carbon cost; identifying strategies to reduce emissions; and preparing to mitigate headwinds as wider cost pressures build.