Zero Ambitions Podcast

Lloyd has been in Paris. He came back very enthused and excited by his experience there and wanted to communicate why to our listeners. “In the face of the climate emergency, a swift transition of the buildings sector is a direct requirement to achieve the goals set by the Paris Agreement”. Approximately, 1,400 people from 70 countries gathered in Paris for the Buildings and Climate Global Forum  ...

This week we got into an area of retrofit that feels neglected: commercial space. It's a subject we definitely touch upon but never really get into , so in order to remedy that we're getting stuck in. First up is a conversation with architects Harry Browne and Séamus Guidera of RKD Dublin who came recommended to us by friend of the show Richard O'Hegarty . In a sector less driven by traditional su...

We are delighted to bring you a conversation with Professor Emeritus Susan Roaf , of Heriot-Watt University this week to talk about a bunch of fundamental problems in building design and the management of thermal comfort. She is a wonderful guest and we're looking forward to having her back. Originally, we planned to talk about her article COP 28: Net zero buildings by 2050? You have got to be jok...

This week we're joined by Nigel Banks , Technical Director - Zero Bills & Low Carbon Homes at Octopus Energy . Nigel joined us to discuss his recent article: Fabric Fifth , a slightly polemical riposte to fabric-first dogma, and an interesting philosophy for retrofit. As it turned out, it’s an apposite follow-up to last week's episode with Fionn Stevenson. Fabric Fifth - Nigel Banks ASHPs ASAP...

We were blessed to enjoy a great conversation about retrofit and what we should consider our priorities, with the vastly experienced retrofit firebrand Fionn Stevenson . It was a challenging, surprising, and free-wheeling conversation spurred by a call to action she made on LinkedIn some time ago, in which she decried fabric-first approaches and declared: "We need to tackle low hanging fruit first...

We enjoyed the company of Ecomerchant’s Will Kirkm an a business that's specialised in sustainable and natural building materials for the building trade and consumers. We mainly rambled our way around the culture of building in the UK, how embodied carbon has always been on the Ecomerchant agenda and the impact that sustainable and natural building materials have on the buildings they make and the...

This week is all about the challenges of low-impact building in the sphere of self build with Tara Fraser , a chartered civil and structural engineer, and a director of Build Collective in Bristol. On the recommendation of former guest (and Tara's colleague) Beth Williams , we recently had a chat with her about a self-build project she worked on that should find itself into the pages of Passive Ho...

Part two of our series on shading, this time with a return appearance from Tom Dollard of Pollard Thomas Edwards who joined us in January 2023 to talk about lazy thinking . Ostensibly, this time we met to talk about the Good Homes Alliance design guide for shading, as a follow-up to December's episode with Zoe De Grussa .    On reflection we realised that the guide does a good enough job without u...

With us this week is new friend, Kelly Alvarez Doran, via an introduction from Lloyd to talk about his experiences at COP28 and his carbon reduction consultancy Ha/f Climate Design that's challenged itself to reduce Canadian construction's emissions by half. We get sidetracked almost immediately while we talk about Kelly's background as an architect, working in mining, and the big changes to philo...

This one is about conservation-led retrofit and the retrofit of commercial (or institutional) building stock. We were invited to see a recent Iarnród Éireann (Irish Railway) retrofit project and meet with Heidi Hopper-Duffy (Environmental & Sustainability Manager) and its architect David Hughes (Senior Conservation Architect & Energy Specialist). Ostensibly, we're talking about energy effi...

The first of our Dublin field recordings is with Archie O'Donnell a long-time face green building in Ireland, a fella who Jeff has a lot of time for, and someone Alex and I hadn't met yet. It was a good call. Originally trained as an architect, Archie has worked his way through the industry, recently joining Danish/Irish consultancy KOSMOS , so there was plenty of scope for the conversation to mea...

This week we have Lloyd's latest Passive House Plus Revisited, a conversation with passive house heads Alan Clarke and Nick Grant about the passive house archive project that left Lloyd so smitten when he visited it last summer. That we’re discussing archive systems shouldn’t put folk off - the point is about thinking differently, about what the challenge really is, recognising the reality of syst...

Happy new year! This week's episode brings you a conversation with Ethan Wadsworth of DiscreteHeat the manufacturers of our new favourite energy efficient (non-radiator and non underfloor) based heating system ThermaSkirt .  We're not there to bang on about a product we like, what we found interesting about this one is that it’s an overnight, award-winning success that took fifteen years to bring...

Happy post-Christmas day, hope you made it through OK. Today we have part two of the latest Passive House Plus revisited, looking at Lloyd Alter's favourite article of 2021: Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction . Again, we're joined by authors Lenny Antonelli and Andy Simmonds talking about mass timber, embodied carbon, why we should just use less and, unexp...

Merry Christmas! This week we have a Passive House Plus revisited two-parter for you, led by our occasional co-host Lloyd Alter, looking at his favourite article of 2021: Seeing the wood for the trees - Placing ecology at the heart of construction . We're joined by authors Lenny Antonelli and Andy Simmonds and the conversation wheels around, covering the place of mass timber as a solution to const...

It's all about shading, overheating, and solar gain with Zoe De Grussa this week. She's the author of that infamous Camden overheating case study that Jeff always references and, at the time of writing, is technical and sustainability consultant at the British Blind and Shutter Association (BBSA). We cover Camden, but perhaps more interesting is the conversation around the difficulties in modeling...

We are joined by Loreana Padron to talk about what it is that a Head of Sustainability does and, more broadly, the value of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) to all the stakeholders in a retrofit project. Loreana tells us about the path she's taken to becoming Head of Sustainability at Architecture firm ECD , a leading sustainability-focused practice, and we take some time to revisit the Wilmcote Ho...

Today we're talking about standards. In short, it's about how standards are written and why retrofit shouldn’t just be about products or carbon. It's never short with us though, is it? We're sure that all of our listeners will have complained about PAS2035/2030 at some point, admiring its ambition while lamenting its restrictions. We've all certainly wondered how they come to be like that too. So,...

We invited Tania Jennings back. Most folk in the retrofit or social housing space will probably be aware of Tania from LinkedIn and the myriad jobs she has. If you don’t know her yet, check her LinkedIn . Anyway, she wrote a thing for Architect’s Journal about fuel poverty, Covid, and inevitably retrofit and it was excellent.  It sparked a conversation about why we’re barely making a dent in resol...

If you fancy, you can settle in for a long one this week, in which Jeff and Dan speak with award-winning Canadian architect and passive house designer Cedric Burgers . We cover all sorts because he has led a pretty interesting life and he has a lot to say about sustainable building design, particularly his love for passive house as a philosophy, the drivers of change in favour of sustainable desig...

This week we're talking about natural fibre insulation and the potential of biogenic building products with IndiNature manufacturer (and co-founder) Sam Baumber .  It feels like a timely follow-up to last week's episode about quantifying embodied carbon, particularly in relation to the role biogenic products have in providing a mid-to-long-term carbon buffer. But we get into the other aspects of i...

If you’re looking to understand how to approach carbon accounting in the built environment, we’ve got you. Brought in to tackle some big questions around accounting for carbon we were joined by sustainable building expert John Butler .  Jeff’s been talking about getting John on for ages, for reasons he explains in the episode, and when we caught sight of an article he’s co-authored for the next is...

Jeff received a press release that piqued his interest, so we invited the man behind the call to action, Joseph Kilroy , (Head of Policy and Public Affairs at the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) ). Joseph joins us to talk about their ideas for increasing the pace of change required to meet the ubiquitous net zero 2050 targets. They're calling for government to incentivise better building pr...

This week we're joined by Mike Fell , energy researcher at UCL, amongst many other things. We've been following Mike's work for a while, (mainly because the pump:chic work is really interesting to us) and when we clocked he's co-authored this paper about realist approaches in energy research we saw an opportunity to bring him onto the podcast. Realist approaches ask not just ‘what works?’, but ‘fo...

This week Jeff introduced us to a new friend he met while working on a EU funded green finance project, Alexandra Hedesiu , Head of ESG & EU Advisory Services at EnerSave Capital . The EU Life-funded project is called Smarter Finance for EU, and its aim is to develop the market for credible green home certifications and associated green mortgage, loan and development finance products, with €8....