HEA Funded project Launched: Towards a Sustainable University Campus
Technological University Dublin recently updated its Climate Action Roadmap which forecasts greenhouse gas emissions, outlines action plans to address gaps to targets, and prepares Scope 3 initiatives to meet 2030 and 2050 targets. The 2016-2018 baseline reports 9,971 tCO₂ emission with an increase to 10,895 tCO₂ emission, mostly due to the addition of buildings. With on-going and planned construction, it is expected that 4,077 tCO₂ will be added. TU Dublin is committed to achieving our climate action goals, and we need to act quickly to accelerate transition from a typical ‘traditional’ campus infrastructure to an ‘automated and integrated’ campus with a view to becoming an ‘intelligent campus’.
So how can we efficiently develop and implement smart decarbonisation programmes and meet the 2030 and 2050 net-zero targets? With smart digital technologies and building information modelling.
On 01 January 2024, TU Dublin officially launched the Higher Education Authority Performance Funding project ‘Towards a Sustainable University Campus’, a major decarbonisation initiative. The project's goal is to pilot a smart monitoring and reporting infrastructure by upgrading existing monitoring and control systems, digitalising three exemplar buildings and working with cross-sectoral stakeholders and through active user involvement to transform them as living laboratories. Data will provide evidence to understand, benchmark, and optimise energy usage within a user-centric approach to enable the co-creation of further decarbonisation strategies.
According to an analysis by Accenture in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, if adopted across industry and public sector, digital technology has the potential to achieve up to 20% of the 2050 emissions reduction needed to meet net-zero targets in energy, materials, and mobility sectors. If industries mobilise quickly, digital technologies can already reduce emissions by 4-10% by 2030.
The opportunity is clear: organisations can achieve net-zero targets faster if they migrate to digital technologies as part of their decarbonisation plan. But we need these transitions to be scaled across all industries and sectors if we are to achieve national and global targets. TU Dublin realises this opportunity and the ‘Towards a Sustainable University Campus’ initiative will act as an interactive living lab tool, where data transparency, digital innovation and community engagement will be key in establishing and disseminating best practices for the higher education and the public sector to transition towards digital technologies.
The project will soon be recruiting 3 key roles:
- Role 1: Project Manager Sustainable Building Information Systems
- Role 2: Senior Smart Buildings Officer Role
- 3: Post-Doctoral researcher in Energy, Comfort, & Occupancy Modelling
Follow project webpage for more information and updates on upcoming job opportunities.