I thank we work India for organising sustainability summit 2025 to help drive real change towards decarbonising the commercial real estate sector. I gained valuable insights from the esteemed speakers especially around policy and regulation in this space.
My own thoughts kept pulling me towards some of the more technical challenges which are quite significant.
The current strategy of making buildings sustainable focuses on reducing the carbon footprint of a building during its operation and construction. In the operational stage the challenge is to ensure that the building can run on green energy. Heating and cooling are the heaviest users of energy and thus obvious targets for decarbonisation.
Since buildings these days scale vertically it's impossible to cover the energy requirements from rooftop solar panels. Unless solar panels can be installed vertically along the facade, the surface area would be too limited to generate any significant power. The idea has been tried —attempts to cover the entire surface of the building with solar panels have been made, but it has not yet become popular. Maybe things can change with new designs.
Glass gets a bad rep but in addition to being a good insulator( glazed glasses even better) it reduces the cost of lighting in the building which despite transition to LEDs only have around 20-25% wall plug efficiencies. The additional heat that it creates is effectively managed by AC which has a very high Coefficient of performance. For every Kw of power they can move 3-5 Kw of heat.
There are other types of buildings that take up more power. Like data centers which are huge guzzlers of energy especially as AI servers are being rapidly commissioned. Onsite power generation through solar is highly improbable for them but still solar panels can be deployed elsewhere to meet the demands.
Green buildings go beyond just green energy requirements. Water and waste recycling is also a part of it. Water recycling or at least reuse is possible if gray water is deployed for gardening purposes but recycling on site is a huge cost factor and one that needs trained staff 24/7. It can make sense if municipal distribution is weak.
Rainwater harvesting is more practical. But the problem is that rainwater can't be directly used for most household chores. It requires filtration and sanitization which might be difficult to do onsite especially with space constraints. The whole point of a high rise is to make effective use of space. That imposes limitations on what can be done onsite. Energy and waste/water recycling eats into that limited space.
On the construction side things are even more difficult. There is no real substitute for cement as of now. Steel is even harder to replace. But some promising experiments have been done like with high rises made entirely of wood in Norway and the USA that are cause for encouragement.
Mandates from the government and a tangle of compliances make construction a very difficult proposition for anyone but those with deep pockets to slog through the hurdles. That might be as intended but it doesn't really solve the sustainability issue.
To find a real solution we’ll have to look at each one of these problems step by step.
Can energy be generated onsite? What kind of technological changes would be necessary to make that possible? System level changes or device level changes?
What about water? Does every building need to have its own recycling system or can it be pooled together to better serve the community? How does one get all the equipment necessary to filter water?
These are hard problems but we can work through them together.
Akshat Jiwan Sharma
Strategy Consultant--Innovation/ Materials science/International relations/Telecommunications/Digital Transformation/Partnerships
Mobile/whatsapp:+919654119771 email:getellobed@gmail.com
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