Visualising Green?

In the midst of clearing out all the bits and bobs from my year as Guild Environment officer, I came across the trail of investigating that I did around the environmental credentials of the Centre of Excellence for Visualisation in Wales, currently under construction on the Penglais campus (shown and scheduled for completion by the end of the summer. I've taken a bit of time to sum things up here and include excerpts where apropriate:

I began by asking, under a Freedom of Information request, for minutes from meetings discussing the Visualisation project that had to do with the BREEAM building standards. I recieved a copy of 'Visualisation Centre Building Group' minutes from the 6th of April 2006 and the following is agenda point 3.14:

"An initial BREEAM assessment will be done to find out the likelihood of obtaining an excellent rating. "Keith Lewis noted that he understood that WEFO [Welsh European Funding Office] had required a BREEAM rating of 'excellent'. Diana Bain confirmed that it was not included in the WDA offer of grant. [Since the date of this meeting, Diana Bain was able to confirm that neither it is a requirement of the WEFO offer of grant.]

"An excellent BREEAM rating will be difficult to obtain due to the glass facade on the main floor and the air-conditioning requirements of the HPC and projection equipment. Options for improving the BREEAM rating will be considered if needed."

A further FoI request, asking for a specific cost assessment for the BREEAM assessment, produced the following response:

> The decision regarding the BREEAM assessment was made in the light of an
> initial cost plan received from the contractors of £3,917,000. This was
> against an available budget of £3,600,000. Discussions with the
> contractors confirmed that the pursuit of a very good or excellent BREEAM
> rating would add significantly to this cost overrun and that it was by no
> means certain that a very good or excellent rating could be ever achieved.
> This is due to the nature of the building and in particular the amount of
> energy consuming HPS and visualisation equipment that it will contain.
> This uncertainty, combined with the budget overrun resulted in a decision
> not to pursue this avenue.
> 
> There was no further discussion in the Building Group minutes regarding
> the BREEAM assessment, following those released to you from the meeting on
> 6 April 2006.

So in the end no BREEAM rating was achieved at all. A £300,00 pound difference to achieve a BREEAM rating is not small change, but for a building whose design life is 60 years, I'm not sure if the math was actually done to take into account savings in running costs. I've certainly not seen anything to that end.

What was most striking to me, however, was how initial requirements highlighted its supposed environmental credentials. The 'Employers Requirements' tender documents, published on the 12th of May 2005, stated as the very first item 1.1: "The building aims to be an exemplar in terms of sustainability."

The Centre also happily recieves £4.3m of European Union Objective 1 funding out of its total 10.4m budget. In the final version of its application form for this EU grant (signed off by Vice-Chancellor Noel Lloyd sometime in 2005), which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the main part of the section on "Environmental Impacts" reads as follows:

"The project complies with all relevant EC and national environmental directives (with particular reference to Sections 1-4 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990). It has no significant emissions to land, air or water. It will not require LAPC or IPPC consent. The building would be built to modern environmental standards and would not use any outlawed susbtances in its construction or operation. A BREEAM audit will be undertaken of the building design in accordance with BRE guidelines, and it is anticipated that this will show a good or excellent rating. The building will be designed to fit in naturally with, and complement, the surroundings on the University campus.

"The Centre will liase with the WDA to incorporate the principles of its Sustainable Development Policy 'Learning to Work Differently', which has the goal of delivering economic growth and improving both living standards and the quality of the environment through the sustainable use of natural resources."

A later section goes on to describe the contribution that the actual purpose of the Centre will make to the environment:

"Visualisation technology has a vital role to play in helping to maintain and enhance the environmental assets of the region. For example, it can be used to model and display the effects of any proposed changes to the environment, such as the construction of on-shore and off-shore wind farms...Although these will help reduce carbon emissions significantly, the visual impacts of such projects are serious considerations. Using visualisation/VR technology, all interested parties - e.g. developers, planners and residents - will be able to better understand the effects of proposed developments."

Indeed, this particular environmental benefit is explicitly made clear as one of the five broad aims of the entire project - coming under the heading of "to improve environmental performance through the adoption of clean technologies" (the others are 'to create a culture of innovation, to create more technology in knowledge-driven firms, to increase R&D investment, and to stimulate demand for and adoption of ICT).

I obviously have no quibble with this part and I fully appreciate the benefits that it provides in this regard towards planning for renewable energy development and so forth. But it goes without saying that environmental projects are held to a higher standard than 'conventional' development. Its functional elements (what the project is for) are perhaps no more or no less important than its operational elements (how the project runs).

If the supposed environmental benefit of the project is played up, it would indeed be a travesty, if not contradictory, that the prospect of ensuring that the building is as eco-friendly as possible has been given short shrift despite initial expectations.