Workshop bolsters Indian architecture and engineering school EE awareness
Delhi, 04.02.2010 - REEEP International Secretariat
At the same time as the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, a REEEP co-sponsored capacity-building event aimed to bolster the efforts of architecture and engineering schools in India to more incorporate energy efficiency and related codes into their curricula, and provide IT-based tools for providing information on standards, products and energy efficiency assessment tools to the building sector education stakeholders. Just as importantly, it aimed to create a network of stakeholders to ensure that these efforts run smoothly.
The workshop, which was formally titled “Network for Energy Efficiency in the Building Sector: Standards, Education and Information Technology” was run by the USAID ECO-III project and India’s Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) in association with REEEP and the Technical University of Vienna (TUV).
The event was held over two days on 3 and 4 February in Delhi. The first day included three technical session tracks, updating participants on energy efficiency standards, research, tools and processes. The second day included workshops with two parallel breakout sessions, enabling the invited stakeholders to zero in on selected key topics in smaller, focused groups working to arrive at specific objectives, outcomes and next
steps for that theme. One of these addressed the status of energy efficiency standards and the evolution of curricula to respond to them, and the other discussed information tools and their incorporation in the building delivery process. The outcome of both workshops will now be used in creating a roadmap and develop a network of interested technical experts who will work to ensure that the roadmap is implemented.
“This kind of capacity-building event aimed specifically at helping architecture and engineering schools to underline the importance of energy efficiency in buildings is exactly the kind of targeted intervention that can have huge knock-on effects in increasing the efficiency of the building stock far into the future,” notes Marianne Osterkorn, Director General of REEEP, “and we will be supporting similar efforts in China during 2010, with an ambitious collaboration with Himin Solar to develop a training programme for architecture students."