Buildings consume a quarter of all the energy used here, and a new research centre aims to drive that amount down - by figuring out how to make them more energy-efficient.
The Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore was one of two new research centres announced yesterday under the National Research Foundation’s $1 billion Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise (Create) scheme. The programme, set up in 2006, allows global universities to establish research centres here.
For its first project, Berkeley scientists will work with local researchers to make tropical buildings sustainable and energy-efficient, said Professor S. Shankar Sastry, one of the centre’s leaders. He said ‘smart dust’ networks, made up of tiny sensors, could monitor and adjust temperature and lighting to reduce costs.
‘I think nobody is looking at the tropics,’ Prof Sastry said, observing that buildings’ energy needs here are vastly different from those in colder climes. ‘And now that most buildings are being built in tropical or subtropical regions like India and China, the potential impact is huge.’
Some of the five-year project’s targets include cutting energy use by 80 per cent in new buildings and by half in retrofitted ones.
The other Create centre announced yesterday is a tie-up between Nanyang Technological University and Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University. It will study nanotechnology’s applications for sensing water pollutants and recycling water, as well as energy harvesting and conservation.
Both centres are expected to officially open in the middle of next year. This brings the number of Create centres to seven, including tie-ups with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Technical University of Munich.
National Research Foundation chairman Tony Tan, who also addressed the press conference, explained that universities have a role to play in inventing products and thus contributing to the economy.
The Create centres will be housed at a $360 million facility at the National University of Singapore’s University Town, which is expected to be ready next year.
