This week we are discussing another existing area of strength that can be adapted as a new innovation pillar for the economy – building things.

To avoid repetition, I recommend you read the previous two articles in this series where we established the background logic.

The population, globally and locally, is anticipated to grow. Project Ireland 2040 says Ireland will have an additional 1 million people in 20 years’ time, while the UN estimates that the global population will rise by 1.5 billion over the same period.

We also have a housing crisis right now, so we need to do a lot of building, but the dwellings need to be environmentally sustainable while also maximising human happiness and dignity. These are hard problems for any country.

The addressable market for decentralised buildings is the entire planet.

The 2040 goal I would set here is Ireland designs a production system for decentralised, sustainable building. 

Initially, retrofit tech can help solve problems for existing buildings in developed nations in Europe and  America while providing an engineering and acceptance pathway to fully decentralised homes and buildings. 

The addressable market for decentralised buildings is the entire planet. These would involve innovating modular, carbon neutral or negative dwellings made autonomously from sustainable, recyclable materials that are largely decentralised or “grid-free”. (Yes, including the toilet if that specific question occurred to anyone). 

The engineering challenges for building tend to be waste treatment, energy supply and preserving human dignity. Once engineering is solved, builders of course also require labour, materials and machinery. These are the reference points I’ll use for this article.

As previously discussed in aviation, Ireland is home to excellent, globally-minded building companies as well as supporting organisations such as CRH and Kilsaran, all of whom are well financed and, crucially, can explain the major global problems and efficiency issues to a construction tech hub. They can then also provide feedback on the developing solutions and ultimately a route to market. 

Construction Tech Town

Rather than developing a construction tech hub, I suggest turning a town into one. A Dublin satellite town that has no great architectural or cultural significance (I’ll leave the reader to suggest some towns!) could effectively act as a living, breathing test area for new building and living solutions.

This would require great bravery from our government as they would need to introduce building policies and legislation that do not exist anywhere else for the project to work. This bravery would come with additional benefit in that it would also then act as a test area for the legislation and zoning itself.

Zoning would be completely overhauled to incentivise companies to redevelop and retrofit housing units with modern building ideas.

Similarly, modern ease of living solutions like drone deliveries would need to be permitted within the town subject to a streamlined, transparent application process.

Building owners should be incentivised to facilitate the overhaul of their buildings. 

New buildings should be required to follow guidelines incentivising use of sustainable building materials, energy efficiency, decentralisation, improved quality of living and grid contribution.

The goal would be to make the hub a tourist attraction for people who wish to view the building materials and buildings of the future before they go global. Another bonus is that as with any novel, brave legislation designed to further the world positively, this news would travel around the world with positive Irish messaging. 

Here is a list of things a tourist visiting Tech Town may expect to see.

Retrotfit tech

Tech Town will display what old cities like Dublin, those throughout the EU and, to a lesser extent, America need to the most – an overhaul of archaic infrastructure to bring in the future.

These solutions will likely need to be developed in isolation first, and the successful ones can converge into a fully decentralised housing solution.

Drone conveyors

Most people in cities today live in apartments. The apartment dweller’s experience of receiving a good typically consists of receiving a call or the doorbell sounds before traveling through the building to get to street level and receive the package from the delivery person.

Drone delivery technologies today look at things like winching packages from a height, parachutes or simply landing at street level, none of which are likely to be too successful in a dense urban environment.

However, were someone to create a drone landing pad that can also receive a payload and convey it through an externally fitted shaft to a collection box at the building entrance, the existing user experience would be matched without any challenging engineering. Indeed, the only real problem here is gaining acceptance for a retro-fitted external shaft running from the building roof to the goods entrance. Perhaps the best design can commission LoveFrom to make it an object of desire? 

Such a device would be applicable to most buildings, but building shapes like the Gherkin or Burj Khalifa may be left behind the revolution or require a niche retro-fit.

Integrating with new builds, it can simply be part of the elevator shaft / stairwell to enable the user to collect goods on their own floor instead of street level. Looking further into the future (while referring to last week’s article) these drone conveyors can then be adapted as SREA pads meaning folk using aerial transport who are not building residents need not enter the building and can enter an exit the rooftop drone terminal at street level.

In Tech Town, we might see intensively populated buildings adopting the retrofit roof system, whereas housing estates may have drone deliveries to their door. Revisiting Tech Town 15 years from then, a tourist may find a public transport system based on similar principles, but carrying people instead of goods.

Waste and water treatment units

Most modern cities struggle with sewage and wastewater. At times of heavy use they can often just send the problem out to sea, as we have seen in Dublin recently. Given the significant structural challenge of adapting underground sewage networks that were never designed for current use levels, more elegant solutions are likely needed.

Fortunately, there have been some wonderful breakthroughs in robust centrifuge reactors that can convert biomass to gas power. These systems could replace a septic tank or be added / included in the basement of a large city building. 

Here all waste would go to the system, with water separated by gravity and all that remains being converted to biogas through heat and pressurization. This completely by-passes the need to be connected to a sewage system. The only waste is fine, non-toxic ash, which can be collected along with refuse and added to landfill or perhaps used to manufacture bricks or other materials. Energy is produced in the form of biogas which can be used as an additional source of environmentally-friendly building power.

The wastewater can be similarly treated on-site and endlessly re-circulated to toilets, dish and clothes washers. Apologies, particularly to the early morning reader at the breakfast table, for the challenging hygiene issues here, but sterilised water is sterilised water regardless of original source!

Rainwater can also potentially be captured and treated on site to provide drinking water.

The government can legislate that all buildings in Tech Town should be able to manage their own waste within 20 years, and we can keep score by publishing the rate of sewage disconnections annually.

Green cladding

As much of Tech Town as possible should be green-clad, creating nature corridors throughout for insects, cleaning the air and acting as a carbon sink while also dampening external heat and providing heat retention within the building. In terms of legislation, all buildings should be required to have some form of external green cladding. 

On the rooftops, all buildings should be required to have at least one or a combination of roof greening, drone landing pad and solar. If people do not access the roof there will be little need for maintenance, so the only real cost to roof greening is the initial set up.

Retrofit cladding and soil garden rooftops already exist, so this is more of a large-scale roll-out and culture problem than an engineering one.

If the walls of Tech Town’s buildings are mostly covered in plants, this will likely be the primary tourist attraction, while also providing an image set that is used by news organs around the world due to its novelty. This is all good positioning for Ireland and will help cultural acceptance of towns and cities that are lush with plants instead of grey with concrete.

This doesn’t just make for pretty pictures and clean air. The World Green Building Council claims that green cladding can reduce building energy requirements by 20 to 60 per cent depending on geographic region. 

Being the first country in the world to prove that large-scale city and town greening is not just possible, but desirable, would represent significant global impact and fits nicely with our existing culture. It is possibly the most achievable of most of the topics I will write about and something that should be prioritised as a matter of urgency given the significant financial, social and environmental upside. Otherwise someone else will claim this opportunity.

Wind and solar generation

Given the global allocation of capital to these problems I’m not entirely sure that Ireland is required to innovate here. Given current trends, there are probably adequate engineering hours being applied to solar efficiency for it to hit required efficiency rates for Ireland well within the next 20 years.

It’s a similar story with wind, so what role can Ireland play here? We will need to figure out what combination of technologies work for Ireland. There are some interesting recapture technologies for high rise buildings, but realistically it is unlikely these will have the ability to generate their own power in the manner that a semi-detached house with its own roof and garden could.

Accordingly then, self-generation will play a role at all levels, but will likely be more prominent in towns, villages and rural living than high-rise areas. For these, the optimal long-term solution is an EU-wide smart electric grid, facilitating large-scale solar farms in Iberia and perhaps Greece to power high density buildings in Ireland. Until then we will need to explore industrial combinations of on and off-shore wind as well as efficient solar to mitigate our emissions.

I don’t see any great business opportunity for Ireland here, the need is primarily driven by our need to decarbonise before we are compelled to by the EU. I suspect positioning ourselves as a willing participant in carbon transition while pleading with the EU to provide modern smart grid access within the next 20 years to make us efficiently carbon free will prove to be politically astute as I see no other pathway for Ireland to generate sufficient carbon free energy without nuclear power.

Novel building materials

Cement production is said to be one of the largest causes of greenhouse gas emissions, so it is an area that will receive much investment in the coming years as we seek environmentally-friendly alternatives.

One solution leading from waste treatment solutions discussed above would be to use the waste-ash to create a form of fly ash brick. Fly ash bricks have been around for over 100 years, so using a different source of ash should not be too controversial assuming similar performance is achieved. This is an incredible recapture opportunity, given it means the output of removing your sewage and bio-waste dependance could be energy and bricks.

When discussing energy generation above, we did not mention biofuels. This is because in spite of receiving much global government support, biofuels make sense as another form of farmer subsidy, but less so as an environmentally friendly fuel given you are growing something to burn it at a time when we need to decrease agricultural land use.

However, using plant waste to create bricks or insulation material instead of burning it creates a very efficient, long-term carbon store. Currently mushrooms and algae are being used to develop such substances, both of which are very suited for cultivation in this country. Fast-growing hemp may also be efficient.

To encourage the development of carbon-capture or -neutral building materials and insulation, the government needs to create a legislative pathway to ensure the materials can be rapidly cleared for use.

They need a material validation framework that, once passed, means the new material can immediately be used on any site in Ireland. This should be backboned by subsidies and other incentives that encourage novel, sustainable materials over the current incumbents.

Cooling and heating

The most efficient modern heating and cooling solution is generally recognised as radiant hydronic heat via electric heat pumps. These cost approx US$8 /square foot including installation. These systems exist today and already do everything we need. 

As an added bonus, if you add two days’ worth of thermal storage to each home (something the size of 2 large water heaters, or a hot tub), you would create another grid-scale battery of approximately 50kWh per home to act as an energy store when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. 

This thermal storage will be cheaper than batteries, at an estimated 1–2c/kWh, and is rolled into the $8/sq.ft. price mentioned above. This system works at residential or industrial scale.

Can anyone explain why oil or gas heating systems are permitted to be sold in Ireland today, when electric heating is more efficient and requires less maintenance?

So for me, the opportunity here is to experiment with legislation – if all new houses are only permitted to have electric heat pump cooling and heating, how quick is uptake?

If all existing homes are given a deadline to convert to heat pumps and are given incentives that reduce as time goes on to encourage fast uptake, how quick is uptake? 

There are many versions of this that can be attempted.

Furthermore (and perhaps for another article), can anyone explain why oil or gas heating systems are permitted to be sold in Ireland today, when electric heating is more efficient and requires less maintenance? I think a bold move the government could make away from Tech Town is to ban the sale of any non-electric heating system unless someone can provide an empirical reason why this would negatively impact the country.

So we do not need to invent anything to satisfy heating and cooling needs, we just need to show the world how rapidly you can transition to systems like these if the political and public will is there.

Human dignity

If we execute all of the above but neglect the importance of preserving human dignity, I suspect it will be doomed for failure. Dystopia beckons in the absence of dignity. History has shown over and over again that if you put any flavour of human ethnicity, nation or religion into a ghetto, after enough time they will, surprisingly, behave like they come from a ghetto.

I don’t think it’s acceptable to provide a human a dwelling area the size of a car parking space, as has been proposed in the plans of some recent cohabitation plans.

Science has a lot to say on living conditions and human happiness. There are many different shades due to cultural norms and expectations (ie, what makes someone from a South African Township sustainably happy may be quite different to someone from Ballsbridge). 

That said, amongst mature western economies the important factors tend to boil down to approximately 500sq ft per person, high ceilings, ample natural light and access to open outdoor green areas. I am actually positive on co-living spaces if they can provide things of this nature as their communal areas can help buffer the modern phenomenon of chronic loneliness.

Another dignity preservation exercise is to resist the pleas of the some misguided wealthy folk to ensure only other wealthy people live near them. This experiment has been recreated all over the world and always leads to the same result: urban and social decay. For an example at home, there is a reason why Dessie O’Malley stated that his greatest regret was the Limerick house zoning program he oversaw.

I think if the government were to introduce standards that prevent buildings and zoning legislation from breaching known scientific evidence on mental and social health, this would again be wonderful messaging. For me, the alternative would mean that even if we achieve all of the breakthroughs I list above, the average citizen would not like to live in these solutions as every ounce of profit will be squeezed out of them at the expense of human well-being.

Novel building tools and machinery

I could potentially write a lot here, as a lot of innovation is required. 

Plastering machines are an obvious one given the largest site overhead after materials is often plastering. Companies with autonomous plastering robots already exist.

The same is true for concepts like painting robots, block laying machines and smart cement mixers.

Looking further forward, mobile 3D printers could revolutionise the efficiency of building sites. The government could legislate that all building plans must be submitted in detail online and, at some point after building completion, are made available to the public digitally. The digitised plans can then be data mined to train building design suggestion systems, rapidly identify buildings made with “problem materials”, etc.

Instead of writing on all of this and more, I will point you to my next article – education. Ireland and the EU are very aware of our chronic software skills deficits and there are many programmes designed to solve this. 

What no one seems to be discussing is the even bigger deficit in mechanical engineering and integrated systems that the solutions I list above require. This is going to be a significant block for any hardware or IoT entrepreneu,r and there is no fix in sight. Today I’d recommend they go to America, Japan or South Korea. I’ll be writing next week on how we might fix this over the next 20 years instead.

Carbon-neutral, decentralised homes

In all of the above I effectively described phase one of Tech Town: retrofits, which brings us to the big prize of phase two: decentralised homes.

This  means integrating all of the phase one technologies into new buildings, with the goal that these homes are not connected to any grid. This means they are capturing, storing and processing their own water, generating their own electricity and processing their own waste. 

The retrofits of phase one caters to the developed, Western world. Phase two caters to the greatest population growth forecast globally, in places like Nigeria, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.

Scalable, modular, decentralised homes will be incredibly important for these regions and the inventors of decentralised homes will likely have the entire market to themselves. If a city planner can pick between a building design that requires full grid connection vs one that does not, assuming there are not bribes in play, it is logical that they always pick the off-grid version.

If we have the only ecosystem in the world with the stated goal of large-scale decentralised habitats, it significantly improves the probability of the winner(s) emerging here. It may take the full 20 years to get from phase one to phase two. It again requires little investment but significant bravery and legislation. 

We can show global leadership and vision from a position of strength, presenting the opportunity to corner the global market in decentralised, carbon-neutral homes.

I think this is the single biggest building opportunity of the 21st century and it is achievable if we demand it from our politicians. No other economy is attempting anything like this – the opportunity is ours to take. 

As Walt Disney once said: “You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”