Who wants to be a building services engineer?

Everyone is talking about energy. The Japanese earthquake has thrown the nuclear future into doubt; social unrest across the Middle East is driving up oil prices; and our government is promising us a ‘green’ future powered by wind, tide and solar.

Energy used to be a long way down the corporate and social agenda – now it is right at the top. It was the threat of climate change that first pushed the energy debate into the public domain, but that still kept it remote from people’s everyday lives. Rocketing gas and electricity bills alongside record petrol prices have now brought it very firmly to everyone’s attention.

Even more dramatic are the stories about our looming energy ‘gap’. Much of the UK’s traditional electricity generation industry is in the process of shutting down and the drive for reduced carbon emissions is speeding that process up. The problem is we do not have enough in the way of alternative renewable and nuclear power to make up the difference – the result could well be rolling blackouts across the country from as early as 2016.

Solutions
The big push in the coming months and years will be to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel generated power and, while that will involve massive investment in alternative sources of energy, it will also require a huge programme of energy reduction measures.  

There is one profession sitting at the heart of this that gets very little notice from the general public, but is becoming increasingly high profile as the Government recognises its role in delivering increasingly vital solutions.

Building engineering services contractors install low energy systems across the entire commercial and residential building stock. The focus of their work has shifted dramatically in recent times towards refurbishing and retrofitting existing buildings – particularly in the current economic downturn, which has drastically reduced the amount of new building taking place.We work with heating, cooling, ventilating and lighting technologies – in other words anything that makes a building habitable.

Without the work of the building services specialist a building is nothing more than a lifeless hulk. However, we are increasingly being given the added responsibility of making these buildings sustainable as well – and everything we do has an impact on the energy consumption of the building.

Technologies
Our profession understands better than anyone else how to make low carbon technologies work by integrating them into existing buildings and already installed systems. We have been doing it for years, but only now is it happening on a mass market scale.

Ironically, however, we are suffering from a skills shortage. The last few years of recession and austerity measures have taken their toll on the industry and led to an exodus of professionals. We urgently need to restock the pool of talent available to carry out this potentially enormous programme of work.

There are around 26 million homes and about two million commercial and non-domestic premises that need to be refurbished by 2050 to meet our emissions and energy reduction targets. That means one building every minute for the best part of 40 years.

There is a long and rewarding career to be had. Are you up for the challenge?