What if buildings created energy instead of consuming it? | Ksenia Petrichenko

[00:00:00] TED Audio Collective What accounts for nearly a third of total global energy consumption and carbon emissions? Well, the answer is all around you. Buildings. That's right. Our homes, the places we work and visit, the spaces that frame our

[00:00:28] everyday lives, they represent one of the biggest threats to our climate on the planet. Experts have been looking for ways to curb this threat, and one concept that really sticks out to me is the net zero building. Generally speaking, the

[00:00:44] concept of a net zero building refers to the idea of cutting emissions by designing more efficient infrastructures and using materials that will be less harsh on the environment, which means that a net zero building is environmentally friendly across its lifetime. And through conservation

[00:01:04] practices and on-site renewable energy production, these buildings can generate as much energy as they use, making their total emissions net zero. Of course, that's not accounting for what we put in these buildings, like appliances, lighting or water systems. With advances in technology, all of these things have the

[00:01:26] potential to be much more efficient too. I'm Sherelle Dorsey and this is TED Tech. Today we're hearing from energy policy analyst Ksenia Petrochenko, who has a plan to make buildings friendlier to our planet. Her ideas show us how bettering

[00:01:43] the spaces we live in can reduce costs, improve our health and move us toward a cleaner world. I wish you could look around the corner to make sense of today's big business and social issues and prepare for what's coming tomorrow.

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[00:02:20] journalist Georgie Frost interviewing BCG's leading thinkers and doers to get you the answers you want and need. Hear the ideas that are shaping and disrupting the future. This is not your typical business strategy podcast. Listen to The

[00:02:33] So What from BCG wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes things in the world of technology are complicated and need careful explaining. Sometimes they just need a little hard truth. I don't think anyone is going to buy a banana with

[00:02:51] crypto at any point in the foreseeable future. I'm Lizzie O'Leary, the host of Slate's What Next? TBD, your clear-eyed guide to technology, power and the future. Friday and Sunday, wherever you get your podcasts. Buildings are not only what they seem. They aren't just inert structures to

[00:03:14] live and work in. They're connected to the energy system and this makes buildings an essential element of the efforts to decarbonize our world. Today I want to talk about changing our thinking around the role of buildings in the

[00:03:31] energy system and how they can transform to bring us closer to our climate targets. But first I want to take you to where I grew up in a mid-sized city in Russia. To me it looked just a grey concrete box like many others. There are

[00:03:51] indeed numerous buildings like this across Europe and Central Asia inherited from Soviet times. They were built quickly to house as many people as possible without much consideration for their design, comfort and energy usage. This is true of many many buildings across the world.

[00:04:11] Non-discrete housing and office boxes built fast and cheap and all connected to the energy system. I live in Paris now and though buildings there look much nicer, from the perspective of energy issues are similar. High energy

[00:04:32] consumption, reliance on fossil fuels and high energy costs driven even higher by the current energy crisis. In Paris I work with International Energy Agency and we advise in governments across the world on various energy issues and for

[00:04:50] that we look at data a lot. And our data shows that at the global scale buildings are responsible for about one-third of total energy consumption and energy and process related carbon dioxide emissions. In Europe for example 90% of buildings

[00:05:09] that exist today will still be standing and in use by 2050. We're also building new buildings. Our data shows that the global floor area is expected to increase by 75% by mid-century. This is equivalent to adding the area size of Paris every

[00:05:30] week for the next 30 years. If this happens with energy consumption patterns of today, this alone will make it very difficult to achieve our climate targets. Fortunately we do have solutions available to reduce direct emissions from buildings by more than 95% by 2050 and for this we need three things

[00:05:58] efficiency, electrification and decarbonization. Energy efficiency must come first and in buildings it should be improved in two ways. First through improving energy efficiency of the building envelope with better materials, design solutions, insulation of walls, roofs, basements, energy-efficient windows. Second through improving energy efficiency of all appliances and

[00:06:28] equipment used in building for space heating and cooling, water heating, lighting, cooking, working and entertainment. However energy efficiency as they say takes a village. Many forces and interests interact during construction and renovation of a building. The developers, the owners,

[00:06:50] the regulators, the architects, the suppliers of technologies, the market itself exerting price pressure. All these need to be aligned and it all starts with the government's mandating minimum energy efficiency requirements through their regulation, putting the right incentives in place and providing clear information

[00:07:13] tools. Building energy codes, standards and labeling for appliances and equipment as well as buildings are among the most effective instruments at our disposal if they're enforced well and together with other supporting mechanisms. Energy efficiency in buildings also depends on us as consumers, the choices

[00:07:36] we make, buildings we decide to live in, appliances and devices we buy and the way we use them at home or our workplaces. So what is the result of improving energy efficiency? Significant energy savings, reduced CO2 emissions,

[00:07:54] lower energy bills and improved comfort, productivity and health of people living in them. The second thing we need is a massive shift towards electricity and of course I mean clean, decarbonized electricity produced from solar, wind and

[00:08:15] other low-carbon sources. If we look at Europe for instance, more than 40% of households rely on natural gas for space heating and cooking. To complicate matters, 40% of all gas consumed in Europe last year was imported from Russia. So there is a climate imperative but also a strong

[00:08:41] geopolitical and energy security imperative to electrify and decarbonize our buildings and make them as efficient as possible. This doesn't only mean replacing energy supply from a gas pipeline with energy supply from an electric line. And here I reach back to my opening point. We need to look at

[00:09:03] buildings differently, not only as grey concrete boxes as I used to do but as potential active players in the energy system. So how can we make buildings active? Through installing efficient and low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, heat pumps, energy storage, making use of smart and digital

[00:09:31] tools. All technologies we already have and in many cases their costs are decreasing. Let me introduce a word we don't often hear. Pro-sumer. Think of a building not only as a consumer of energy but as pro-sumer, both consuming

[00:09:52] and producing. Most of buildings can produce at least part of the energy they need. In many cases they can produce more. Such buildings already exist in many parts of the world. In Switzerland for example there is even a single

[00:10:10] family house that produces 800% of the energy it needs. But still we have a long way to go to make them a common practice. Besides challenges with improving energy efficiency and installing low-carbon technologies another obstacle is that our electricity networks or grids as we call them were

[00:10:34] designed to operate with large centralized sources of generation like power plants. And their design hasn't changed much over the past century. So increasing decentralized or distributed smaller scale generation especially from variable renewable sources like solar and wind can really put pressure on

[00:10:59] existing electricity grids and challenge their stability. So we also need to rethink the way our entire electricity system is designed. Smart grids can communicate to a building through software algorithms and smart controls and for example send a signal to a connected device such as your heating

[00:11:21] system to temporarily stop or reduce energy use or if possible shift it to the time when electricity is more available, cleaner or cheaper. This can really improve robustness of the electricity network and help to avoid for example

[00:11:43] rolling blackouts which are becoming more common while consumers can get paid for it. If you have an electric car and you keep it plugged in for a prolonged period of time, a smart charger can help to find the best time to charge it

[00:11:59] depending on the information from the grid. This can help save you money and support the electricity system. It gets even more interesting. Electric cars are essentially batteries on wheels so they can also be used as energy storage and

[00:12:15] dispatch electricity to the home or to the grid at the time of need. A building itself can be used to store energy for some time but you need to make it energy-efficient first. Potentially you can also get paid for making your

[00:12:34] energy storage available for electricity system to store renewable electricity when there is too much of it. For example when there is a lot of sunshine or wind but demand is not high enough to use it all. It's almost like

[00:12:51] renting your spare bedroom on Airbnb just for hosting electricity. Now imagine a future with many many buildings, solar panels, electric cars, energy storage other distributed devices, drawing electricity from the grid and supplying electricity back to it. Obviously we would need a way to manage all this

[00:13:17] data efficiently and in real time, make sure that devices interact well with each other and able to communicate to the grid and optimize electricity demand and supply for the entire system. Virtual power plants, digital and intelligent platforms can do just that. They can aggregate electricity

[00:13:42] consumption and production from many distributed resources, make use of local storage and manage complex interactions. Virtual power plants can also facilitate peer-to-peer renewable electricity trading. Imagine that electricity that your building produce, for example from solar panel but you don't need at the

[00:14:06] moment, you can sell directly to another building that needs it via an online platform. A project like this has been running already for several years in one of the districts in Bangkok and is showing benefits to the consumers, the

[00:14:21] grid and the planet. There are other pilot projects like this in different countries but for them to scale our policy frameworks and electricity market design need to undergo substantial changes. Our buildings need to become more efficient and grids need to evolve into smarter managers of distributed

[00:14:44] energy resources. It's a dramatic shift, it's like going from old television world with a single broadcaster to a new connected world where everyone can generate and share their own content. Remember that building I grew up in? You

[00:15:03] might be surprised but during winter it would often get too hot inside the apartment even if it was minus 30 outside. It was because of highly inefficient central heating system which we couldn't control or do anything about.

[00:15:19] We had to open the windows to get some fresh air and more comfort. Now I want to take you to my current flat in Paris where I have tiny but very smart boxes attached to my electric heaters which can automatically turn them on and off

[00:15:38] maintaining comfortable temperatures, lowering my energy bills and providing flexibility to the grid and I can control all that on my smartphone. The technologies that we have now we need the policies, the investments, the will and

[00:15:59] a new way to look at buildings not as passive users of energy but as active players in the energy system. Buildings that can consume and produce energy efficiently, interact with a smart grid and respond to its signals providing

[00:16:18] flexibility and bringing us closer to our climate targets. Thank you. Alright that's our show. Thanks for listening. TED Tech is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Isabel Carter who also wrote

[00:16:43] it with me, Sherelle Dorsey. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar and the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Farrah de Grange for her support as a project manager. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more.