Download Guest lecture By Professor William W. Nazaroff

Guest lecture By Professor William W. Nazaroff
On Thursday 7 May at 3:00 – 4:30 pm at DTU in Lyngby, Building 101A, Meeting Room 1, Professor William
W Nazaroff from the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, University of California, Berkeley,
will give a guest lecture with the title:
” Beyond Scylla and Charybdis: Sustainably Improving Indoor Environmental Quality”.
The talk is the first of a series of presentation entitled “Civil Engineering Distinguished Talks” (in short “CEDTalks”).
Abstract:
Beyond Scylla and Charybdis:
Sustainably Improving
Indoor Environmental Quality
William W Nazaroff
Daniel Tellep Distinguished Professor
Civil and Environmental Engineering Department
University of California, Berkeley
Along business-as-usual trajectories, atmospheric CO2 levels will rise from the current 400 ppm to
the range 650-900 ppm by year 2100. The best alternative for limiting climate change during this
century involves transforming society’s energy supply and end-use systems to achieve large-scale
cuts in fossil carbon emissions. Both adaptation and mitigation responses are needed. The large
scales of necessary changes pose enormous challenges for those concerned with the built
environment. If we do successfully navigate past anthropogenic climate change caused by an
overreliance on fossil fuels, what changes might we anticipate for the late 21st century in the built
environment? One important feature would be a weaning away from distributed combustion as a
major energy transformation process. Electricity will be provided to buildings from sources with
low net carbon emissions. We will need to curtail the burning of fuels for purposes such as heating
and cooking. Personal control over key attributes of the indoor environment will become common,
promising associated benefits such as lower overall energy use and higher occupant satisfaction. In
low-income countries, household air pollution problems will diminish as a consequence of two
pivotal transformations: (1) replacing inefficient kerosene lanterns with highly efficacious LEDs;
and (2) replacing inefficient and highly polluting solid fuel cookstoves with efficient and clean
electric induction appliances. Within this large frame, my research group currently focuses on a
few key aspects of indoor environmental quality that center on human occupants. We are studying
the gaseous, particulate, and bioaerosol emissions from human occupants of buildings. In
Singapore’s tropical climate, we are studying the extent to which occupant satisfaction and
cognitive performance can be met at higher temperatures augmented by user-controlled fans. Like
Ulysees in the Odyssey, society faces perils on our sojourn through the energy-climate nexus in the
21st century. On one side is the inertia of the status quo, which makes the unacceptable business-asusual paths the more probable ones to be followed. Hazards also lie along our path if we
myopically focus on saving energy in buildings without sufficient attention to the importance of
meeting the real needs of occupants. However, if we study carefully, execute well, and choose
wisely, we may find calmer waters beyond Scylla and Charybdis.