Open day success for Sustainable Building Envelope Centre

A trade and industry open day was held at Tata Steel’s Sustainable Building Envelope Centre (SBEC) at Shotton, Flintshire on 27 September in order to give construction professionals a view of the technologies under development.

The Centre funded by Tata Steel, the Low Carbon Research Institute and the Welsh Government, is into the sixth month of a three year programme looking into the most efficient methods to capture, store and dissipate energy from the sun. The aim being to evaluate, evolve and enable greener technologies for the built environment to help the country meet its carbon reduction targets.

Daniel Pillai, Director of SBEC said: “Our vision is to transform the role of the building envelope and fabric, from one of passive fuel and energy conservation to that of active generation of renewable energy, including storage, distribution and management.”

“The aim of our open day was to inform the wider construction industry who we are, and what we are doing, and ultimately to engage them on this exciting journey to create buildings that are power stations, so that together we can deliver the environmentally sustainable and low to zero carbon buildings of tomorrow.”

The current technologies under investigation build upon the existing core technologies of transpired solar collectors and photovoltaics with a view to enhancing their capability and viability by combining them to make a complete energy system where the whole is greater than the sum of the components.