Electric.ie January/February 2022

26 ELECTRIC.IE • The Magazine & Website for the Irish Electrical Industry • How retrofitting creates a 'powerhouse' of efficiency ർ By Robert Insull, Residential Marketing Manager at Schneider Electric UK & Ireland Schneider Electric W e all want to make the right decisions. To that end, consumers, enterprises and governments have joined forces to tackle climate change. However, the reality is that we are limited by our understanding of the challenge ahead. We simply cannot make significant progress without smart data-driven technology to support us. Digital retrofits of homes must become a standard measure, alongside more traditional approaches such as insulation, if we are to have any chance of meeting our energy goals. Emissions from households in Ireland were 13 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2019, a number which has remained stagnant in recent years – much of it due to design inefficiencies in our buildings. While consumer technology and behaviour evolve at an ever-increasing pace, our built environment remains stuck in the past. Much of Ireland’s housing stock remains old and inefficient, with much of it built in the early half of the twentieth century using materials and construction methods that tend to result in lower BER ratings. For this reason, the built environment represents almost a quarter of the country’s carbon footprint and is the sector that’s crying out for action. Achieving net zero homes is an urgent priority, with retrofitting representing the only feasible means of achieving it. With 80% of 2050’s buildings already having been built, retrofitting projects that enable more efficient data usage can highlight energy efficiencies to reduce carbon emissions and minimise waste. Yet the environment isn’t the sole beneficiary. More and more, we are seeing how a focus on environmental efficiency and design contributes directly to longer business growth and greater savings. Retrofit as standard Retrofitting isn’t a new practice, but it is having fresh life breathed into it by a new generation of smart technologies. Retrofitting can take many forms, from simply fitting insulation or removing gas boilers and replacing them with heat pumps and heat networks. But, at its heart, it revolves around augmenting what already exists – extending the lifetime of old systems and enhancing their capabilities. Not only this, but the practice of retrofitting is significantly cheaper than ripping out and replacing old systems wholesale – while achieving very