A top United Technologies Corp. executive is urging the world’s urban planners and builders to think beyond individual structures to achieve greater efficiencies from sustainable city-scale solutions.
Sandy Diehl, UTC vice president for integrated building solutions, said developers, planners and government officials have only begun to achieve the environmental and economic benefits that come from creating large-scale projects with systems that work cooperatively for greater efficiency.
“As developers take on bigger projects, it’s clear that a different set of sustainable solutions can be adopted to ensure smart growth,” Diehl told an audience in China on Monday.
“This will be done,” he said, “by leveraging the presence of high densities of technologies in urban environments through integration. It will also be done by choosing alternative energy solutions best suited to the scale of projects being built.”
Diehl’s remarks were delivered at the opening of the International Conference on Green and Energy-Efficient Building & New Technologies and Products Expo in Beijing. UTC is a major event sponsor.
While single buildings rely primarily on efficiencies realized from individual systems, city-scale solutions hold promise for harnessing such clean power alternatives as wind power, combined heat-and-power systems, and solar projects, Diehl said.
Greener “eco-cities” will unite the efficiencies of individual buildings with the potential of clean power generation to decrease the overall energy footprint far beyond what either strategy alone could provide, he said, citing the groundbreaking work on eco-cities being done by the Chinese Society for Urban Studies.
“We must be committed to the bold but essential vision to build vibrant cities for tomorrow with the least environmental impact,” he added. “And we’ll do it by ensuring that all the important pieces work together as a system.”
