Earlier this year I facilitated a retrofit-themed round table with developers, owners and operators at Cisco’s City of London offices (see list of attendees and key themes discussed here). As part of the follow-up I co-wrote an article for Smart Buildings Magazine on Retrofitting buildings and the drive towards net zero. We quoted Matthew Marson from JLL Technologies, who pointed out that there is a tough challenge ahead when it comes to drive to net zero given the yearly energy consumption target of 55kWh per m2, when average is around 160 kWh and best in class around 110.

Matthew could not make the round table but recorded his Net Zero Carbon: Smart Buildings, Technology & Retrofit presentation he was planning to give:

The presentation also formed part of his recent No Regrets – How Smart Buildings Are Valuable in Uncertain Times speaker session at Smart Buildings Show. I’ve included it in this post because he touches on starting with low hanging fruit to scale retrofit. His point being about looking first at which technologies are most impactful and can be easily retrofitted to reduce resource consumption and drive energy generation, i.e. as means to help scale retrofitting. And doing this before looking at major system replacements, renewable sources of energy or architecture upgrades.

That’s interesting because some of the attendees at the round table mentioned how they were working with the vendors to identify that low hanging fruit. It would be great to hear more about what was identified and impact it has been having, and hopefully from others doing something similar.