The future of energy in buildings with Professor David Jenkins

As the world moves towards a net-zero future, how we design, use, and power our buildings has never been more critical. Professor David Jenkins, who leads both the Urban Energy Research Group and the theme of Energy in Buildings as part of our global research institute iNetZ+ at Heriot-Watt University, shares insights on how energy modelling, policy, and real-world solutions can shape the future of energy in buildings.

Q: How do future energy scenarios help with planning for net-zero buildings?

David Jenkins: One of the biggest challenges in designing sustainable buildings is ensuring solutions remain effective for decades, despite an unpredictable future. While we can’t predict everything, we can use informed projections, such as climate change data, to understand potential shifts in energy demand. For example, during the pandemic, we saw how changes in human behaviour impacted energy usage in buildings. These insights help us model different future scenarios, from technology adoption to the transition away from gas heating, so we can develop strategies that are resilient in the long term.

Q: How do you predict future energy demand and technology trends?

David Jenkins: We actually prefer the term ‘projections’ over ‘predictions’ because of the inherent uncertainty in future scenarios. Some factors, like climate warming, are quite well understood, while others, such as which technologies people will adopt, require more informed guesswork. We create multiple projections, test them in our models, and explore how different choices could change the pathway to net zero. This helps policymakers and industry make informed decisions about the best strategies moving forward.

Q: What are the biggest challenges in making existing buildings more energy efficient?

David Jenkins: The main challenge is tackling two things at once: reducing energy demand while decarbonising the supply. In theory, these go hand in hand, but in practice, it’s much more complex. Different buildings require different solutions, and scaling up these solutions across entire building stocks presents both technical and practical challenges. Often, the real obstacle isn’t the engineering itself, but the implementation, getting new technologies into buildings effectively and ensuring they work in real-world conditions.

Q: What key messages would you like to highlight?

David Jenkins: The challenge ahead is huge, our carbon reduction targets are ambitious and require urgent action. But the good news is that we already have many of the solutions we need. We know how to cut carbon emissions from buildings, and the technologies exist; we just need to act on them. Individuals can make choices about energy use in their homes, but large-scale change requires support from business, industry, and government. The transition to net zero is achievable if we work together and commit to making it happen.

At iNetZ+, our research is helping to bridge the gap between modelling and real-world implementation. By combining expertise from physics, data science, and social sciences, we aim to ensure that our work doesn’t just stay in research papers but leads to real, impactful solutions.

Read more about the work taking place in Energy in Buildings.