 Hello everyone, welcome to Stanford Sustainable Finance and Investment seminar. My name is Soyoung In, your seminar host. To first briefly introduce myself, I am a research fellow at the Stanford Sustainable Finance Initiative and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. We have this monthly seminar on various topics of sustainable finance and investment. And it is organized by the Sustainable Finance Initiative at the Prequotency for Energy at Stanford University. So for those of you who joined for the first time, please mute yourself during the talk, please. And if you have any question, please do not use the chat window. Instead, please raise your hand and ask your questions. We want to have like a real conversation. Okay, and today we have our speaker from the National University of Singapore, Professor Lan Keepo, is Provost Chair, Professor of Architecture and the Built Environment in the NUS. He was also a faculty member and currently a Emeritus Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. So I met Professor Lan Keepo at the Global Sustainability Forum and immediately became very much fascinated by the all this interdisciplinary research project he has conducted in the United States and Singapore. So it is real pleasure to have him to our seminar series. Today he'll be talking about his research on decarbonizing the built environment. So please welcome Professor Lan Keepo. Professor Lan Keepo, please take the stage. Well, Sooyang, thank you very much for the introduction. Good afternoon to all of you in Stanford and good morning to folks joining from Korea. I'm Keepo Lam, I'm here in Singapore. So we are kind of in the same time zone as Korea more or less. It's a real pleasure to be here with all of you today. Thank you so much for inviting me to share in this seminar. Let me first of all declare that I'm not a finance or economics person, I'm just a lowly architect with a strong interest in building performance and diagnostics. However, of course, the idea of finance and anything to do with money covers all aspects of all our lives, right? And so in that sense, we have a common interest to address that in whatever field of research or development that we are involved in. So today I'm bringing this perspective from the built environment in the discussion of this idea of value versus cost proposition. Just to give a kind of an overview picture, this is the Global Real Estate Universe, a study that was done by the civilians folks. And as you can see, the real estate is really the largest asset class, they call it, right? In the world, if you look at the pie chart, just the residential itself is $258 trillion. And then if you add commercial and you add agricultural land, that comes up to over $300 trillion, which surpasses everything else as you can see, right? Global GDP is only 85, debt security, 123, equity is 109. So it is a very, very big and significant market in our everyday life. We as human beings spend 90% of our time in building, so one sort or another in our daily world, living and play. So it is a very, very significant sector and therefore has tremendous impact in every aspect of our life. And also, of course, in the whole financial and economics equation. Now, the question then is, when we talk about value, right, of real estate, what do we really mean? I wanna sort of strip it back down to some very basic. As I said, I'm not a finance person. We all encounter choices in our life. For example, when we typically ask an ordinary person to say, why would you spend $1,000 versus $3,000 on a computer? And by and large, the majority of people will be able to tell you why they choose one versus another. Well, it has more memory, it has the latest chip that perform and run faster and it has a lot more hard disk space, the connectivity is great, et cetera, et cetera. Most people will be able to list out the criteria or the performance, why they spend $1,000 versus $3,000. Now, some people might even tell you, I spend more because the design looks great. So there is also a value proposition in design and I think you may agree with me that Apple computers have always been pitching their product and they are branding in this particular arena of design. And people are willing to pay more because they value that particular aspect of the product. Same thing with re-hecodes, right? I mean, every car has four wheels and it will get you from point A to point B. Why would somebody pay $100,000 versus $300,000, right? So again, it has to do with what the branding and the value associated with that particular, what I would thought is a very utilitarian piece of product, right? And then as you ask people, they will also tell you, well, this car would give me so many miles of gallon and it can go from zero to 60 in six seconds. Those kind of performance metrics are often also being used and most people will be able to articulate that. Now, just in case you wonder, is it really cars can be so expensive? Well, it turns out that in Singapore, that is a fact, particularly in Singapore. I think we have the world's highest car price and just this was news yesterday where COE stands for a certificate of entitlement. You need to bid for that certificate before you can buy a car, okay? So you see the figures there, category A, B, C and D, A, E. That amount in Singapore dollars is what you need to pay in order to just get that piece of paper before you are allowed to buy a car. Amazing, isn't it? If you look at Cat B, it's 116,000 Singapore dollars just to get that piece of paper. And on top of that, you need to buy the car and the car itself has a huge import tax led by the government, 150% to, even more than that now, I believe, in addition to that price. So to own a car in Singapore is a luxury even for a normal standard utilitarian car. And there's a reason for this, right? Why the cost is so high is because the government wants to control the number of cars in Singapore and Singapore being a very, very small country, right? 700 square kilometers is tiny. And yet, even with all this control, the car population is almost a million now, 998,000 vehicles on the road. And 12% of the land of Singapore is occupied by roads, would you believe that? So there is a tremendous pressure to control this. Otherwise, we will be in a real jam, no pun intended. And pricing is one of those mechanism that is used, right? To moderate and to control this. So that's one of the many factors that affect cost, right? And not just the, it's quite aside from the valley. Now, when it comes to real estate and that's where we are in our sector, why would you pay 1,000 versus 3,000 square foot? And if you ask the realistic agent, they say, oh, simple, the answer is location, location, location. And that mantra remains very real. People will pay and value properties that are in good location, whether it is the healthy air quality or whether it's transport accessibility and to amenities, to good schools for their children, et cetera, et cetera. So value is being placed on those in order, and that affects how much people are willing to pay. That's just, you and I as laypeople would typically consider when we talk about cost and what is the value to us. But obviously, today's topic, we want to look at the externalities of the built environment on the whole sort of the planet, if you like. And the climate change track is real. It took years and years to get to a point where now people, or at least majority of people recognize that this is happening. And how do we mitigate and deal with carbon emission is one of those big challenge. And apart from what I started saying that the realistic industry is by far the largest asset class, right? And its contribution to the carbon emission as seen from this report also testify to that and they are correlated, of course, right? And up to 37% of all global emission is contributed by the building and construction industry, as you can see here, all right? And this is this, I think is a nice way to track. I track this particular report that comes out of IEA and partners, they produce this report regularly with quite a great amount of detail which I use. So as we look at percentages, I just want to highlight one point, is that percentages are good to give us a kind of relative scale. I'm one that always relate the percentage to the actual quantity. And here, if you look at 27% minus the 10% of other construction industry is 8.7 gigatons of CO2. That's the real number. And I think we should continue to make sure we grapple with those real numbers rather than the percentages because the pie can continue to change. And here in Singapore, as you can see, and it's connected to everything that I've been saying in Singapore with regard to the transport, for example, and so on, you can see that Singapore's economy is premised on industry, right? Singapore really has zero natural resources and everything else. For the longest time, we import everything literally. And therefore industry as the backbone of the core of the Singapore industry implies that the use of power is by far the biggest share, as you can see. And then come with industry transport and then buildings, and these are the percentages. And here, the entire country admits 49.7 megatons of CO2. If you do a quick comparison of the world's emission just now, in just the building sector, I know we can't compare apples to apples that way, but just for the sake of it, the amount of CO2 emission in the construction sector in the world can run the entire economy of Singapore 250 times. That's kind of the order of magnitude, right? That the industry is confronted with. Now, again, giving a price to carbon is all over the place, as you can see in this graph that have been tracked by the Institute of Climate Economics. Singapore, right at the little dot at the bottom is $4, $5 and there's plan to raise it to 10 and then to 25 and eventually to maybe 50, 60 in the longer run. But if you look at this graph, the price is all over the place, right? And the reason is again, depending on the local condition, depending on the policies of the country, they are supplying their demand in order to drive this carbon emission mitigation. And this, of course, remain one of the most challenging debate at the world kind of a platform, right? Between those that are developed versus those that are developing, how do you price this thing? And then the many, many other countries that haven't even started thinking or putting a number to that carbon. So it's a massive challenge on trying to find a way to be able to share that burden globally in terms of mitigating carbon emission. Big, big challenge. Every time you go to the World Economic Forum or the COP, this is one of the biggest sticking point and lots, lots more work yet to be done. So the answer that Singapore comes up with is to say that the whole idea of sustainability is not just one sector. You have to take a holistic approach, the whole of government and the whole of country approach to deal with that challenge. And so Singapore has a green plant that was launched about three years ago now. And it's obviously, it's a living dynamic plan that constantly get revised. And when I say to get revised, it always gets tougher and tougher, meaning that the targets are being raised very, very rapidly. In response to the fact that, you know, climate change threats, particularly to Singapore, being a small country, as I say, in a low-lying island, the sea level rise and all that are very, very real. It's not something that we sit and talk about. These things, it is happening as we speak. So the way to address this is in this very holistic plan that deals with governance, that deals with nature, how to connect with nature, how to change behaviors like sustainable living. It's really a very important part. And then of course, providing the infrastructure, making those infrastructure as green and as effective and as possible and efficient as possible. Then it can then make sure that all the economic factors associated with driving all of this are brought into bear in not only... Yeah, you can just go to the Google website. Somebody is speaking at the background, okay. So to drive the green economy and not only in terms of sustainability, but also this whole idea of resilience when a disaster such like what we have just been through happened, how can we bounce back in a resilient way as quickly as possible? And that's also another very important factor to bring in into that whole cost versus value proposition Now I can't help it, but to pitch design and being an architect and here design is not just about architecture, it's not just about our buildings. It's really about the way of thinking, a holistic, innovative way of thinking that applies to the entire green plan that I have shared just now. And this is our Prime Minister, Mr Lee Seng Loong who said this, right? Good design thinking was a key reason for Singapore's success from a third world to a first. In a short 50, 60 years, not a very long time span and it will remain critical for the future of the Singapore's transformation to be an outstanding city. So this is really one of the key sort of parameter of criteria for success, design thinking in an innovative way. I learned this from Carnegie Mellon when I did my PhD at the Center for Building Performance and Dynastics back in the late 80s, early 90s. And we were able to experiment and explore and build this intelligent workplace on top of a 1904 building to do a lot of the groundwork that addresses this idea of building performance and measuring its real performance in order to try to come up with real empirical justification of value of our real estate rather than just the first cost. And this is just an overall framework that I continue to use in all my work in my entire career both in teaching research, as well as in consulting work, real-life projects. The idea is that at the end of the day, everything we do is to meet human requirements. I think that and the value we place on those human conditions should be factored into everything we do, all right? Particularly in our buildings. And if you look at the top right-hand box, those are the four conditions, physiological, psychological, sociological, and economics. Everything else are just the technical processes and products that drives those four human needs. And that is universal. It doesn't matter where you are. And we have then classified the conditions or the performance criteria or mandates we call them under six categories, spatial, meaning how do you organize space? And with the pandemic, this really came into the forefront because of the dramatic changes in the way we have to adapt to the use of our buildings, whether it's commercial, our home, exhibition halls were used for temporary hospitals to cater for the COVID patients. Our home became an office and on and on and on, right? So that highlighted that important performance which we have been talking about for decades. However, now with the conditions we are confronting, we are given a new perspective to that. Thermal, of course, heating, cooling, keeping us comfortable. Indoor air quality, and now again with COVID, this has really risen to the top concern of everybody. Whereas in the past, people really didn't pay much attention to that. Visual is the indoor lighting conditions and acoustics remain a big challenge. And then ultimately building integrity. How do we maintain our building in order to ensure that the original performance as designed when the building was first opened is maintained over its lifespan, okay? So that's really in a nutshell what defines to me and to us who believe in this framework the value proposition of any building that we design, build and operate. And connected that, of course, has again a global impact. And one of the very important factors to deal with this is true codes and standards, practices, best practices, regulations, and this is something that will be continuously needed to drive the change in industries around the world. So obviously to do that, we need a process and the process is to design, construction, commissioning and operation, this is all well known. And typically we've been paying money for that, right? And everybody pays for that. It pays for the consultants, it pays for the contractors and then the facilities folks. But only very recently has this measurement, evaluation and verification been brought into light and given extra attention. The old kind of approach is that if don't fix it, if it didn't work, right? If nobody complains, let's leave it as is. The idea that is this still optimal? Is this still performing? As I said, per the design specification, most of the time we don't pay too much attention. We do it as sort of a crisis management approach to our buildings by a large, right? But this has again changed, thanks or no thanks to COVID that this has come to the forefront that we need to pay attention to continuously measure, evaluate, verify what our buildings are actually doing in order to deal with all that performance mandates that I talked about. And each of this has their own connection, right? The indoor-outdoor environmental interaction, given the fact that climate change is affecting everybody. Yesterday here in Singapore, there was a statistics reported that we have had the most rain in the last month compared to the last 40 years, right? Hotest weather, et cetera, et cetera. And the health and wellbeing of people are really brought to fund, brought to bear again. So these are all the factors that need to be continuously monitored and measured and in order to really bring forth the kind of cost and value into play in that. And we've applied that, I've applied that in projects that we've done. This was the one that was done way back in 2000 and now 20 over years ago, it's a URA building where we applied that total building performance concept to a new build at that time. And you can see that energy performance back in those days for office building is considered extremely good. And we've got a price for this. Compared to average office buildings at that time, we're running around 270 to 300 kilowatt hour per square meter per year. So we've been able to apply technology to drive that down. And then this is a national library, another example that I've done back in 2000 and to be able to drive those kind of design performance, a lot of technology needs to be brought to bear in order to secure and to realize those real performance. And we're very pleased to see that this particular project actually set the bar for the green mark is equivalent to your US lead, right? Where we were able to design the building to around 150 to 160 and the government decided to plug a number here at the 20 percentile of all buildings based on statistics of all buildings to label the first green mark platinum design when he started back in 2005 at 178 in our building. This national library was able to meet that quite significantly. Now this building when it was built and this is public information, it's a 58, almost 59,000 square meters and the project cost was Singapore $203 million at that time. Okay. Now if you divide that, it turns out to be about just under 3,500 Singapore dollars per square meter. That was the cost, the price we paid for this building. Fast forward to today, if you look at cost of buildings in today's standard, for that money, you can pay for a three star hotel, three star, which is really quite entry level. And yet we were able to, through a very integrated design approaches, able to derive huge amount of value to be able to get an icon like this to be enjoyed by the Singapore population and visitors alike. So that's the value proposition again. Not that the Singapore government will sell this building, I don't think so, but they had made many, many times over in terms of investment, simply because this building performed very well. Okay. And so with that, back in Pittsburgh where I was, we continued to push the bar and this is a much smaller building, kind of a 2,000 square meter center for sustainable landscape. But we again want to use all that knowledge and technology to drive it to net zero and we were able to achieve that through very, very integrated approach from design to construction to operation. And as you can see, the PV at that time generated 59 and the building is operating at around 55, 54. And we were able to use computer AI and a lot of modeling calibration of models to get to very, very good accuracy, and as you can see the prediction using measured data, we calibrate the model, the energy model of that building and predict it forward. And then we measure it and we were within 1.2% of the prediction. Now that's not bad at all. So the point I'm trying to make is that the technology is there provided we are able to get the data, of course, right? And that's one of the key factors for good research to be able to get data. Now that's just the building. What about the people? Remember, we talk about financial. It turns out that as you can see, the energy percentage of a typical commercial building is that salaries of the people working is by far the largest cost as you can see from this graph, all right? Celery, benefits, and then the technology that we put in, things like all the IT, connectivity, et cetera, et cetera, rent, mortgage and energy is tiny, tiny little piece. The point I'm trying to make here is that focus on the people. Not that energy is not important, okay? Because energy actually translates also to the carbon emission, as we have said. So we need to tackle that for its own importance in the global picture. But if you do your buildings well, you can be energy efficient and provide for a conducive environment that the people who work in there, the investment that you put in there, you can derive a lot more value out of that in terms of the productivity gain. And a lot of study have been done by my colleague in CMU, Professor Vivian Loftnes, some of you may know, have been studying this for many, many years. Just amongst many things, let's look at indoor air quality, okay? We do, she and the students do case studies over a long period of time, where there are evidence that good indoor air quality actually impacts productivity gain. And these are very specific cases in different buildings in a commercial setting. Anyway, between 3.3% increase up to 14% in some cases, right? And this is by providing good indoor air quality. Very, very, now, if you take this percentage and multiply it back to the investment in human salary, you can immediately see covers a whole host of costs, including getting the building operating effectively. So to design good buildings, you have to really understand the climate and understand the surrounding information. And we do a lot of modeling. This is by the way, a model of the NUS campus, our home university campus. And we look at the airflow around the campus. And modeling is great, but you really, really need to, again, make sure that the prediction is indeed correct. And therefore, there is no other way but to do onsite measurement in order to calibrate and verify those models. And this is a kind of research we do on campus to be able to make sure that whatever we model and simulate are in fact real. And through that model, then we can then identify where are the well ventilated spaces? Where are those that actually have potential heat island generated? And then as we intervene in those conditions, we can then deploy appropriate design approaches to deal with those very localized at the micro level site conditions. So this is a, so I will now go into the case, two case studies that we have done just to illustrate in greater detail what we mean, what we mean by deploying those kind of performance-based approach to design. SDE by the way is the old name of the School of Design and Environment. A year and a bit ago, we merged the School of Design and Environment with the Faculty of Engineering, which is huge. It's I think three, four times the size of our school at that time. And now we are the College of Design and Engineering whereby all the departments from the school and the faculty are now under this college administrative setting, okay? But the departments remain the same. The architecture is still there, the built environment department is still there. Civil environmental engineering is still there and they are continuing their business. So this is something that has happened. So when you see SDE, just remember that it was the old acronym for the School of Design and Environment, okay? So that's where we're talking about. This is a site and this is the western age of the NUS campus. The design for SDE 4, oh, let me go back. You see this is the SDE 4 building. I hope you can see my cursor and that is new built. It's a building that started from ground as it were. And it's a building that was designed to be net zero. At least there was the original goal net zero and it was in fact certified by the construction authority in Singapore to be net zero when it first opened in 2019. So this building has been operational for the last three and a bit years now. So now designing to mitigate on the carbon emission is to really look at what is the, first of all, the purpose. Remembering that it should be people centric. Different buildings will have different functionalities but we need to focus on what those are to maximize the fit for purpose to support the vision and the mission of that particular community. So for us, it is health, well-being, very important, education, how that can support education, flexibility because we continuously experience changes both in our curriculum as well in the way we teach and the way we want students to learn and to integrate into the community of learning. And then obviously for those who are conducting experimentation, we want it to be a living lab as well. With very clear targets international as well as national benchmarks like the International Well-Building Institute to get it certified, Greenmark, the International Living Future Institute and the zero energy, under that the zero energy certification. Here in the tropics, the fundamental design principles are not rocket science. We are just one degree north of the equator. So we just have summer, summer, summer and summer, right? We don't have to deal with all the seasonal changes as in other climatic conditions. So given that sort of standard or uniform climatic conditions, subject to climate change, I want to highlight that too, the technique to overcome the sort of impact is really quite straightforward. We just need number one to shade the east and the west because the sun is constantly in that direction, of course, at the roof level, but at the same time maximize ventilation, natural ventilation and to create spaces that are comfortable, shaded and well ventilated. That helps tremendously in driving down the demand side of the energy equation and thereby reducing the impact on carbon. So very simple, very straightforward. But to try and convince people to do this is extremely difficult because the sort of pre-perception is that we want our buildings to look international. We want glass towers. It doesn't matter whether you are in San Francisco, L.A., London, New York or Korea or Seoul or Singapore. We just want this glass towers that has no shade and just glitters. Somehow that is given value, somehow. And I honestly don't know why. It's just one of those human things that everybody say, well, you have one, I need one, you know? But in many circumstances, it does not make sense. And certainly in our hot humid tropical climate, it doesn't make too much sense. And we need to get back to the vernacular, we call it, right? The traditional approach to use passive methods to deal with those harsh climatic conditions first and then use technology as a supplement. And so these are pictures. We have a huge overhang and that overhang shape is used to put our solar PV, right? 1200 pieces of them. And that's how we get this building to net zero. This net zero is real in the sense that it's contained within this building. We do not, as it were, import. In fact, this building is now operating at net positive. I'll show you in a minute. We put it back into the grid. So shading looks like this, very perforated. It has a nice lighting moderation, creating this sort of transitional interstitial spaces that students can use, they can do their models and spray painting and what have you without incurring the air quality problems if they were only allowed to do indoors. So it has multiple functional requirements, not just in terms of climate mitigation, but also in supporting their learning in architecture and design. Here's the figure. Since opening in January 2019, the green bar is what the PV is generating, the orange bar is what is consuming, and every single month since day one, we have been net positive every month. And the blue line shows the cumulative net positive, the excess that we were able to generate. And this is put back into the grid, right? And that has been shared with and used by other buildings on campus, which are on the grid. So, and just last year, our building when we came for recertification by the authorities, we were recertified as net positive. So we're at peace that, you know, people constantly saying, well, when you design a building for today's standard, three years or five years down the road, when you want to recertify the standards that moved on, the building has obviously, you know, operationally deteriorated or buildings do deteriorate. They, it's just a fact of nature. And then they struggle to get that new certification. So for us, we say, if you invest in the longer term and do it well, then those standards as they continue to improve can in fact be maintained. And we have shown that to be the case. Now this building runs on average annually around 450 megawatts. And as you can see, we've already accumulated 765 megawatts. And over the last two, three years, we have enough extra to run this building for free for the next year and a half to two years. So that's the investment return just on the energy side, okay? And this is just a view. As I said, we've been certified last year to be net positive. Now, one of the challenges when we started this journey and they started 10, 12 years ago here in Singapore anyway, people were still saying, well, solar PV is so expensive, can't afford it, et cetera, et cetera. But if you look at the evolution in this case of the module cost, it has changed dramatically. What made this change? It goes back to fundamental economics, right? Of supply demand. If there is demand, the cost will come down. That's just a very, very basic rule. So if we know what we should be doing in pushing those frontiers, pushing those boundaries, doing what is right and good for our nation, our economy and the climate, why not? The price will take care of itself. When I started talking about solar PV in my career research in the late 80s, people thought I was crazy, all right? I said, Professor Lam, no way will PV ever happen? Well, it happened. Anyway, it used to be $105 here in 2015 per watt, by the way. Now it's 20 cents, and in fact cheaper than that. So this really is the crux of the matter. If we do and push for the right thing to do, price will, the market will take care because of the supply demand curve, all right? And this will apply to many, many things in the building industry. Now, new build, people say, well, that's easy. We can start from scratch and design it well. We took on the challenge to say, well, what if we do it for existing building? And this is SD 1 and 3. This building was built in the mid 1970s, okay? And it's still for renovation. And so we took on the challenge to say, can we apply those same principles that I have articulated to turn this into a net zero building? That's our goal. And it turns out that not only can we not do that in terms of the operational carbon, we were even able to now dive into the embodied carbon equation because we retain the existing structure. And this graph shows you that the whole, if we just tear the whole building down and rebuild, this would have been the incursion of the kilograms of carbon, the first bar at the top, right? Now, because we retained the existing structure, we were able to do adaptive reuse and you look at the embodied carbon, immediately we were able to save that amount. I mean, it's a no-brainer, right? And then tackle that energy efficiency for operational carbon, which is the long blue line. And we continue to deploy lessons that we have learned in SD4. And for us, it was the hybrid cooling system that made that transition happen. Hybrid cooling is simply combining traditional air conditioning with the good old ceiling fans, which before we were rich enough to have aircon everywhere, people were using ceiling fans, right? Everywhere in our climate. So we brought that technology back, integrated with air conditioning, and we were able to save as much as 60% of the energy for cooling in the building. And so we were able to drive it all the way down. And for SD1, the building on the right there, you see that has been indeed certified beginning of last month to be net zero. And this is just some pictures of the construction that this picture here on the top left, you see this tower here. This was the air conditioning tower of the 1970s. That's the size and monstrosity in those old days, right? Anyway, we don't need those anymore. Things have become much more compact, much more efficient, took that down and transformed, reclaimed that space and transformed it into a garden like this for the enjoyment of the students and staff alike. And this is what it looks like now. And the students continuously enjoy that connection with nature, with all the flora and fauna surrounding the site that we have meticulously kept. And this is what the facade looks like. Again, you look at the shading, we introduce extensive shading because this is a west facing in order to reduce the solar impact. And the shading is articulated to demonstrate the various sort of a dynamic impact on the solar onto the facade that generated this particular architecture. And these are the numbers for SD1, SD3 is not the solar PV hasn't been installed yet. Again, same graph, green is what we generate, red is what we use. And as you can see, we are in fact net positive. Now we will continue to collect this data over the next couple of years. When we go for a re-certification, I'm quite confident we will get net positive as well for this building. Right now we are certified for net zero. So just to end with all the performance and all this justification, I hope I've convinced you that the whole value proposition centered around people should be our main goal and criteria. But as part and parcel of that whole agenda, it's really to uplift our sort of spirit, to feel that the environment we live in and work in is in fact pleasant, conducive and a happy place. So the traditional sort of mindset that beautiful architecture or should not very often are not performing well and those that are engineered or highly engineered that perform well may not look good, we want to prove that that is not and should not be the case. And we are very, very pleased that our buildings, both SD1 and SD4 have been recognized internationally to really combine both beauty as well as sustainability based on all those criteria that I mentioned. We were one of the world's six most beautiful buildings according to AD anyway. And then SD1 won what they call the best of the best in the Indian awards in 2021. So we are very, very pleased that we are able to demonstrate to ourselves and most importantly as educators to our students. Because if we don't practice what we preach or what we profess, why should we expect our students to believe us? So we really, really need to provide the reality, the real context. So as they learn, they are able to experience this and truly believe that this is doable. So while that green is indeed our mantra moving forward and we will continue, there's still a lot more to be done especially in the health and wellness side. Lots more work and exciting opportunities awaits all of us. But with that, thank you very much. I've taken 15 minutes. So I'm open for questions. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Lam. Again, you know, I am very much convinced by even like seeing those evidences from the various site construction. This is fascinating. Any question from the audience? Oh, sorry. How can I raise my hand? Oh yeah, yeah. Or you can just go straight in. Oh yeah, thanks. Thank you, Professor Lam. I'm a PhD student in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. Hello. Yeah, great to see you. And by the way, thanks for the great talk. I learned a lot from you. I'm really new to this kind of building areas or something. So it might be a really naive question, but even the data from the SDE-4, even SDE-1, it seems like PV generation is quite enough to provide the energies that is required to run the library or your department buildings. So if that's really the case, then why don't we use PV panels to generate electricity for the buildings around the world? I mean, what can be a potential drawbacks or the challenges for deploying the PV panels around the world? Okay. Thank you very much. That's a great question. Here in Singapore, as I said, we have nothing. And therefore, the only thing we have in the hot to mid tropics is the sun. And therefore, solar is one of, in fact, the only homegrown renewable energy source that we can have. We have no wind. We have no hydro, nothing. So, and again, even given the very small land mass, right? Singapore tries its best to maximize solar PV everywhere, including putting PV, floating PV on our reservoirs. By the way, water is the other big challenge for Singapore. That will be another topic. But they even integrate PV on reservoirs in order to recoup that land, that space to generate PV. In the old days, as I said, cost was always used as the excuse, not to do it. Now, as you can see, there's really no excuse anymore. However, there are still a couple of challenges. One is really the infrastructure that support the solar PV system, okay? Now, as you rightly put, what we have in our own building, we designed it to be self-contained, self-sufficient, but it is still necessary to have a grid to put those surplus back into the grid. Likewise, in other climatic conditions where you do have more fluctuating use, right? Because of your seasons and so on and so forth, a robust grid that allow the energy to be put in and taken out in a way that doesn't disrupt the stability of the supply remains a design challenge in many, many circumstances. Different countries have different aging infrastructure. So catering for those fluctuations in order that it doesn't disrupt the grid and the supply remains something that needs work. A lot of research have been done, but in terms of taking your point about globally, in many, many places, many cities and countries, they are just not having really dive into how to develop those grids, those infrastructure grids in a robust and adaptable way. Number one. Of course, after that is all about the economics, the pricing, how much do you charge if you want to use, draw from it, and if you do have surplus to put it back in, how much would you be paid? Those kind of economics debate discussion, again, very tremendously in from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So those are the kind of more macro level challenges that need to be addressed in order to further enhance this solar PV use, at least for our climate condition, to make sure that the maximum benefits can be gained from this particular technology. Yeah, I see your point. Thanks. Thanks, Professor Lam. Probably maybe last question from me. Since we are sustainable finance investment seminar, and I think our discussion is actually naturally getting there and then you already covered a lot of points during your presentation already. I have a question about how those buildings are being financed. Like we are talking a lot of PPP as a means to decarbonize the built environments and so on. And then what I'm seeing is maybe the interest of the public sector and interest of the private sector and their value proposition and then their value transition to some economic values might be different. How you are seeing this and then have you ever captured certain evidences from working on those real fields? Yeah, good question again. Again, the basic point is that the factors that affect this pricing and cost and value and finance will vary from city to city jurisdiction to jurisdiction. As you can see, even the carbon pricing, which everybody believe is the single most unified way or rather a metric to influence globally at least, but to come to any kind of even a baseline consensus remains a big, big challenge. So given that condition, we just have to deal with the local whatever condition that we are confronted with, both at the city level or national level. In Singapore, our city is our country. It's so tiny. So we need to take that into account and then justify and work out those, you know, not just the capital investment outlay, but the operational outlay. When it comes to investment in infrastructure, obviously, that is a government, right? Responsibility and that I think is understood or at least assumed. And then the once that infrastructure is in place, then it will benefit the various sectors, both in terms of public buildings as well as private sector buildings to be able to tap into that infrastructure. And then, of course, pay for that service that has been invested upon by the government. So those sums need to be worked at that level. Now, at the building level, I just want to make this point, you know, every time there is a new innovation, whether it is net zero carbon or whatever we want to introduce, immediately, almost, you know, without debate, without discussion, the industry will levy a premium on it. Just because it's new. Without, you know, even debating or discussing, how can we deal with that cost by creative design? I think design is again coming back to the keyword. If we take an integrated approach, you will be surprised how we can actually save money and still achieve the performance and not think of it as incremental addition to what is already there. When you want to put something new, you should take something off the table, right? The old stuff, why would you want to keep the old stuff and then put the new stuff on top of the old stuff? If you do that, obviously the cost, the premium will continue to go up first cost and then operational cost. And this is a big challenge, by the way, in our construction industry. OK, so we need to really take a step back and say the last step back and look at from the holistic integrated design approach and then prioritize what are the technology and what is really needed to drive the sustainable design, the net zero and what is added or added nice to have things, OK, which may or may not contribute to the zero carbon equation. In fact, more often than not, they contribute to adding carbon, like importing granite and marble from Europe, you know, to put on our floors and our walls as an example. So I think those kind of discussion needs to be taken from get go for projects both from the infrastructure at the governance government side, as well as then the private and public investment at the building level. I hope that kind of answer your question. Yeah, in this, you know, like the new way of thinking value proposition, you know, like and then how that can be aligned with those, you know, the actual like the material values and so on. That's that's really fascinating. Thank you. We are five minutes over. But, you know, that much, you know, like it was very, very interesting discussion that we had. Thank you, Professor Long, for joining us today. I know it's already in the morning in Singapore. I have another class in at 10 o'clock. OK, OK, after you to run. But thanks for joining. We wish to continue this discussion and lead to the some, you know, interesting research collaboration and so on. So, yeah, thanks for joining us. I mean, for the participants, you know, if they have questions, do drop me an online note. And if they'd like to have links to more papers or web, you know, resources, just let me know.