10101006Net Zero HVAC for High Occupancy BuildingsClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKNet Zero Living is a particularly hard challenge when it comes to built environment where decarbonisation has been the slowest. UK's buildings are still responsible for 25% of UK's GHG emissions (House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee 2022) with very little progress in reductions achieved over the last 15 years. As much as Domestic Retrofitting is slowly gaining momentum, stimulated by schemes such as SHDF, ECO4, LADS and high fuel costs the non domestic sector faces a tougher challenge, especially high occupancy buildings where occupancy driven building services are responsible for a much larger energy consumption than fabric related heat loss. Buildings, such as theatres, cinemas, concert halls or sports halls are inherently difficult to operate efficiently due to their high recommended ventilation rate (minimum 10 litres p/s per person) that necessitates high and continuous heating or comfort cooling (with cooling load made higher by lighting and other equipment). There are 860 cinemas in the UK with 4620 screens and 117m tickets sold in 2022 and 1,100 theatres with annual audience of 34m people. The project will utilise Natural Ventilation, Airflow Dynamics and Heat Recovery expertise as well as previous innovative work done by Ventive to design passive and low energy Building Services complete with ultra efficient heating and cooling that can be fully offset by on-site PV generation for the Lighthouse Arts Centre, Poole, which contains a concert hall (1500 seats), a theatre (670 seats), a cinema (103 seats), and a studio theatre (135 seats). Current energy consumption of the Lighthouse Arts Centre is 1.8 GWh (gigawatt hours) per year and it will have to be reduced by over 80% to enable Net Zero transition an energy self sufficiency (with exports balancing imports over the year). As such the proposed project is at the cutting edge of the Net Zero adaptation of a large (and intensively used) section of UKs built environment with a specific and widely replicable User Focused Test Case.