13 partners, 22 months, one mission: our consortium-led Transform-ER project aims to enable one million home upgrades every year by 2030. This blog series tells the stories of our tactical team of partners and the retrofit barriers they are addressing – and next up is Tata Steel, our ‘steel solutionist.’
In this latest instalment, we catch up with Ella Quigley who has led Tata Steel’s contribution to the Transform-ER project, to discuss moving into the retrofit market, why interoperability is key to scaling retrofit, and the importance of collaboration and integrated teams to ensure successful project delivery.
I started at Tata Steel eight years ago as a construction-based research engineer in the R&D department. This is the role I was in when the Transform-ER project started, but I recently started a new role as Building Physics and Sustainability Engineer with Building Systems UK.
Building Systems UK is one of the businesses within Tata Steel UK that manufactures construction products. We make Trisomet® sandwich panels, Trisobuild® built up cladding systems, ComFlor® structural flooring, and RoofDek structural roof deck, among others.
Tata Steel understand the need to decarbonise across all areas, and we are on our own decarbonisation journey right now. We also understand the need to improve the comfort and quality of buildings through retrofit, and to make them healthier and more affordable for occupants.
Building Systems UK’s main market is non-domestic and we are seeing the non-domestic retrofit market grow and we want to further develop solutions and guidance for that. But we also want to explore whether there is a market for the efficient use of our products in residential retrofit, alongside Catnic, a Tata Steel enterprise, who are also involved in the project and whose products are used in both residential and non-residential markets.
Interoperability and interfacing of different solutions is key, not only to delivery times and retrofit costs, but also the long-term performance of the building after retrofit.
Analysing how solutions from different manufacturers can interface and work together prior to a project creation is fundamental. But this is not a straightforward task. It’s not necessarily about drawing up standard details for every eventuality, it is more about understanding the solutions and what each one needs to perform as intended, so we know what can be tweaked and what can’t.
The Transform-ER Community Interest Company (CIC) has this understanding at its core. This leg work will be done up front as much as possible, enabling solutions that work together to be packaged up into an offering that can be rolled out to all suitable archetypes.
Over time the number of packaged solutions will grow until we reach a point where we have tried-and-tested offerings for all house types. As this approach becomes established, it should also become quicker and easier to onboard new solutions and to swap one solution out for another.
Certification of products/solutions/measures is also a real challenge. How do you demonstrate that an envelope solution, such as external wall insulation, is suitable for a range of retrofit applications when there is so much variation between buildings, and so many performance characteristics that a solution needs to claim against, such as thermal, moisture, fire, structural etc?
Our work package has unpicked a lot of these issues, but we need industry wide consensus on how to demonstrate compliance of retrofit products, in ways that are time and cost efficient and don’t stifle innovation.
Firstly, we need integrated supply teams. This means all parties working together under contractual models that support efficiency and quality.
We also need modern, industrialised solutions for retrofit. Solutions that can be mass produced and installed quickly and easily by semi-skilled workers. Interoperable kits-of-parts have been a project focus, and the CIC will be set up in a way to help enable this through pre-approved packages of measures.
We need technologies that streamline decision making and give us a deep understanding of the properties identified for retrofit, so we can select the most appropriate measures and manufacture them correctly the first time.
Finally, we need long-term, stable government support and policy framework, such as support for sustainable construction, retrofit, decarbonisation, advanced technologies and modern construction practices (whether that’s Modern Methods of Construction (MMC), Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA), kits-of-parts, platforms, digitalisation etc.), and policies that promote and enable them. We have seen how well this can work with our own decarbonisation transition.
Our focus is on the retrofit measures, i.e. the envelope products that will be used to upgrade fabric.
We need to do more work developing and testing some of the interfaces that we worked on during the Transform-ER project, which focused on Building Systems UK’s Trisomet® sandwich panels used in combination with Catnic SolarSeam®.
And we need to undertake initial retrofit pilot projects with Catnic SolarSeam® before we move to rolling out solutions at scale.
I have learned that even with access to all available property data, including from inspections and scans, there will always be unknowns that are only discovered when work starts on site.
Therefore, manufacturers need to anticipate different eventualities, and their retrofit measures need to be adaptable so they can easily accommodate variation on site without leading to delays or impacting performance.
It’s also important that contracting structures and relationships enable all parties to pull together to resolve issues in a timely and robust manner. We need to work together rather than be adversarial. This is the foundation that the Transform-ER CIC is built upon and what I think the retrofit industry really needs.
Tens of millions of homes need to be retrofitted, and each house is essentially unique, so it’s a big challenge.
The collaborative framework that underpins the Transform-ER CIC is key to overcoming many of the barriers that the industry has faced to date. But we need others to join us, this is not meant to be a closed group of collaborators, we need other manufacturers to bring their existing solutions or develop new ones so we can tackle all types of homes.
We also need to be able to easily onboard any new technologies that could enable this journey as they emerge.
