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Professor William Swan (Land Economy 1991) is the Director of Energy House Labs, two world-leading energy performance laboratories within the University of Salford designed to study emissions and energy usage in controlled conditions.

The built environment contributes 40 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions, and so reaching net zero will require a more comprehensive understanding of how buildings can use energy more efficiently. The two Energy House Labs, launched in 2012 and 2023 respectively, were built to assess this issue. Each consists of a large environmental chamber, with Energy House 1.0 containing one house and Energy House 2.0 three houses (with capacity for a fourth). The chambers can simulate a range of controlled temperatures and weather conditions under which the efficiency of energy-saving systems in houses can be measured.

William was a part of the original team who devised and developed these laboratories. “One of the problems we saw was that it was very hard to build an evidence base about what worked [sustainability-wise],” he says. “The old-fashioned way of doing it is to measure or test something, and that independent item performs or doesn’t perform. But houses are systems. Or you do a massive field trial, and that takes years and costs hundreds of thousands of pounds.

“What we had was a way of doing a repeatable experiment. Very simply, we could add a thing or a system to the house, test it without, test it with, take one away from the other and then see what the impact was.

“It’s a globally unique piece of research capacity, and it has a huge amount of interest. It separates itself out a little bit from the way other universities do it, in that we’re very applied and very measurement led. There’s a lot of modelling out there, there’s a lot of big data; we’re very hands on.”

The insights acquired from Energy House Labs will allow existing buildings – which are estimated to still make up 80 per cent of the building stock by 2050 – to be retrofitted to reduce their energy consumption. William acknowledges that there are a range of challenges which arise when considering retrofitting houses, including potential disruption to their occupants’ familiarity with their homes and a lack of workers trained with the required skills. He hopes that through educating homeowners and through a future consistent government policy on retrofitting, these challenges can be overcome.

In conjunction with his work with Energy House Labs, William is also Director of Sustainability at the University of Salford, where his primary aim is “to make sustainability business as usual”. In this, he places a major emphasis on the impact of the university’s procurement, which accounts for around 90 per cent of its Scope 3 emissions. He says: “Changing the questions we ask when we buy things can make a huge difference. I think sometimes we pay lip service to a lot of these things, so actually generating the enthusiasm to dig down into what we do and the choices we make and how to make them more sustainable is really the shift of mindset that we’re looking for.”

William finds his work in sustainability to be highly fulfilling. “I like the fact that what we do makes an impact. I really enjoy that,” he says. He recalls working with a start-up which equips United Nations disaster relief tents with sustainable radiant heat mats, which can be powered by car battery and recharged using solar panels, and which are currently being field trialled in Ukraine. “To me, those kinds of things where you make that marked difference to somebody’s life, even if you’re just a bit tangential to it, that’s the kind of thing that has a lot of value,” he adds.