The Future of Building Safety and Sustainability: A Q&A With Joel Ritschel

Industry trends from now until 2030 and beyond

What major shifts do you expect in building safety, security and sustainability practices by 2030 and what is driving them?

I think the biggest shift is the co-mingling of all of those things. Safety and security and sustainability are not separate practices anymore. It's all part of building performance rather than separate entities.  And when I mention sustainability, I’m including business operations and resiliency, as well as environmental sustainability.

So, you’re expanding the definition of sustainability.

I am. I see it as the sustainability of business operations or business continuity. There are many factors. What's the sustainability of my business? How do I continue to run this company, entity, building, asset, etcetera? Sustainability is reducing the risk so that we can continue operating today, tomorrow, next week and next year with minimal disruption and interruption.

How do you think regulatory requirements and standards are evolving around the world to either support or encourage this?

The words change a little bit, but the drivers are becoming global in tone. So, in terms of where I see the evolution, I think the regulatory landscape used to be more prescriptive and now it’s more performance-based. We’re also seeing more global adoption. I wouldn't say levels of stringency are becoming standardized globally yet, but we're seeing more places grabbing onto that idea, and that's the first step toward true adoption. And then I think at some point we'll start to see some standards coalesce into a more typical standard setting.

Another way they’re evolving is that historically, regulations and requirements were really focused on new construction. Now, a lot of the new regulations are looking at the existing building stock as opposed to just new construction requirements. There's a lot more existing building stock than new construction stock, so that shift in focus is inherently going to push more efficiency and sustainability..

What role will new technologies — such as AI and digital twins — play in building and construction over the next five years and beyond?

I'm actually having conversations with some of our customers about this right now. I think it's more about the modeling and decision-making processes than anything else. You can run iterations so much quicker with AI and say, “Do I want to design it like this, or do I want to add this feature?” You can examine the fiscal impact versus the energy impact and the trade-offs and things like that. The speed at which you can run scenarios is incredible now, as opposed to someone continually manually updating a computer model.

The same is true with digital twins. You can look at how specific changes will affect an existing building before spending the money to make that change.

Building technologies, smart buildings and automation

What digital building innovations show the most promise for driving sustainable performance gains?

In buildings, it's automation. I’m talking about HVAC, lighting, occupancy sensors, all of those things. For example, if there's no one in the space, we turn the lights off, and we change the temperature set points. But if you’re also using AI, predictive modeling comes into play.  For example, this room hasn't been occupied on a Monday morning for the past six months, so we're going to turn off the lights preemptively until someone enters the room rather than waiting for an occupancy sensor to tell us no one's there. We’re not there yet, but we're getting close to that.

Do you see any barriers to that?

Of course. Even if we have all that innovation, we can still have a workforce that distrusts the technology. They’ve been in the industry or in the same building for 20 years, and they know how it works, so they’re going to operate it like they always have. That sort of mentality is everywhere as technology shifts and changes, and it can be an uphill battle

How do you think the changing workforce, the increasingly younger workforce, is helping to support these changes?

The trust factor. Technology is what the younger workforce has learned in school or in their apprenticeship programs. They're key to driving these changes. You can set all these things up during construction, but it's the people who are operating it day to day who are going to have to continue implementing the technology to get the expected performance out of it.

So that changing workforce is key to actually realizing the efficiencies and the technology that we're seeing. The technological gains mean nothing without operating it correctly. Just like my 13-year-old daughter can zoom around her iPad much better than me, the younger workforce that believes in these innovations and just inherently trusts the process and the data. And when something doesn’t work, they won't go back to manual or analog. They're going to look for the next thing. Building owners and operators are also incentivizing a lot of sustainability, safety and security metrics, so there’s a tangible reason to use this new technology to achieve specific results.

How do you think that emerging building codes are influencing the adoption of these digital technologies and smarter building systems?

They're nudging owners and operators toward these technologies, whether they're explicitly requiring it or writing the code in a way that almost forces the use of some new technology to meet the requirements.

So, it's like leading a horse to water, because you need to use this particular technology to be able to stay compliant. And it’s quickly becoming more than a pass or fail situation. It’s ongoing reporting or an ongoing readout or an ongoing performance-based requirement.  

Energy efficiency and building performance

What strategies are most effective for reducing operational energy use without compromising comfort, resilience, or uptime?

I think it's actually the small, incremental changes that are the most effective for reducing energy use. When you're thinking of uptime and comfort specifically, it's really just stringing some of those easy wins together. They're more palatable for people to implement. They're easier to understand. People have the budget for them. They don't typically need to go as far up the chain for approval because the spend on those changes is relatively low or even zero.

So, that's where buildings can find some of the biggest opportunities. Those things like smart scheduling, system optimizations and continuous commissioning within buildings. I think you can get a lot of those results without people knowing you're doing anything at all. For example, changing your thermostat a degree or two. People can't recognize that, but that can have big savings across a 50-story building. Similarly, turning your HVAC on 15 minutes later in the morning or off 15 minutes earlier in the evening. That's a significant change when you extrapolate it across a large building or a large portfolio of buildings.    

Do you think the industry is starting to see those incremental changes serving as the catalyst for bigger changes?

I think some are. Those who are ahead of the curve are able to quantify that and use it as an opportunity to grab capital. I don't think everybody is. I don't think people are using that as a lever like they should be.

Where do you see the biggest energy-saving opportunities that are still underutilized in commercial and industrial buildings?

Again, it’s those small changes. Most of my customer base is class A commercial real estate, where you have a staff dedicated to running that building, and most are run pretty well. However, the majority of building stock is Class B and Class C, manufacturing and logistic centers and buildings like that, typically don't have dedicated engineering staff, so there’s opportunity out there for optimization of control sequences and occupancy-based systems management and moving from static schedules. These buildings have the most low-cost opportunities.  

So, there's this opportunity to gather and analyze data to make some of these choices and to demonstrate potential savings and meaningful accomplishments?

Yes. And that's the biggest gap. Whose job is it to collect the data? What data should be collected? Who’s going to look at it? What does the data mean?  

That's where someone needs experts to help look at that data. At UL Solutions, we run all the ROIs, the net present values (NPVs), all of the deep dive into the data and financial metrics to identify the best opportunities. Without a third party, companies have to do it in-house. In most cases, that’s not in anyone’s job description, so no one's thinking about it. It’s also new, so if the people hiring are not thinking about it, they're not hiring people who know how to do it.

Future strategy

What is the most overlooked challenge between now and 2030, and what do you think these building owners and managers should be thinking about?

I think a lot of people have strong targets and ambitions, and it's really hard to execute because of existing capabilities, whether that's a limited number of people or the skills gap. With that, because technology is changing so quickly, people learn one system only to find that the next generation of that technology will soon replace it. Technology is moving at a speed that many people and organizations can't keep up with, and I think that is a big challenge. Along the same lines, people are investing in sensors, smart meters, new building management systems (BMS) and other technologies, but what's the long-term plan to integrate those things?

Which emerging regulations or global policy shifts do you expect to have a big impact on the industry in the next five to 10 years, and how should building owners and operators prepare?

I think building performance standards will evolve to include carbon disclosure and transparency regulations around the world, and that will have a significant impact over the next five years.

Lastly, how can industry stakeholders strengthen collaboration across the value chain to deliver resilient and future-ready buildings?

Collaborating across that value chain. The original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), the designers and the end users. Getting the end users involved early is important. Everyone has a shared stake in it now, including the end user. So, I think how we collaborate is already changing, but we also need transparency. I think life cycle assessments (LCAs) and environmental product declarations (EPDs) are already doing some of that by wanting to know where something is coming from, what its carbon impact will be, and how long its life cycle will be, because we're going to have to disclose that and its impact on the building or building occupant. I think this is going to force collaboration to happen

So, all of the stakeholders need to get together, work together and be transparent from the start of a project and move away from only thinking about first costs and value engineering. And if a regulation is what’s forcing everyone to be innovative and transparent, so be it. Sometimes, the regulation has to be the hammer.