Keynote Speakers

Prof. Dr.
Susan Roaf

Biography

Sue Roaf – B.A. Hons, A.A. Dipl., PhD, FRIAS is Emeritus Professor of Architectural Engineering at Heriot Watt University, Honorary Professor at Deakin University, Melbourne and at the University of Queensland and Honorary Doctor of Engineering at Southampton Solent University. An award winning author, architect, teacher and solar energy pioneer. She spent ten years in Iran and Iraq, on archaeological excavations, nomadic migrations, and researching desert technologies. Her 24 books include those on The Ice-houses of Britain, Ecohouse design, energy efficient buildings, adapting buildings and cities for climate change, sustainability indicators, adaptive and resilient thermal comfort, natural energy buildings and transforming markets in the built environment. She has organised many conferences including www.plea2017.net and www.icarb.org and led the Scottish Government programme on Adaptation in the Built Environment from 2010 to 2016. She now leads the Comfort at the Extremes movement (www.comfortattheextremes.com) working since 2019 in Antarctica looking at marginalised communities in heating Australia.

Talk Outline
Climate Safe Design in Natural Energy Buildings

New thinking is urgently needed on basic building design to help populations adapt to ever more extreme weather events and climate trends. To both minimise emissions from buildings and to ensure occupants remain thermally safe in buildings even during catastrophic weather events there are three basic requirements: to run buildings for as much of the year as possible on local natural energy using natural ventilation; to use passive solar heating in winter and shading in summer and importantly to use energy storage in the mass of buildings to shift and shave temperatures to create thermally well-behaved and resilient buildings. Reconnecting indoor climates to those outdoors highlights the need to exploit the varied internal micro-climates at different times of day and year to minimise energy use and maximise free comfort. What will save people in extremis when grids fail during heatwaves is not a machine, but the building itself which is why we need the Climate-Safe Buildings that are discussed in this ta.

News

BBC
Ecohouse: 30 years of Britain’s first home with solar roof

Heriot-Watt University
The quiet revolution that began in an Oxford home

Prof. Dr.
Pieter de Wilde

Biography

Pieter de Wilde is a full professor at LTH in Sweden and visiting professor at Strathclyde in Scotland. He is Director-at-Large and vice-president of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA), Associated Editor of Advanced Engineering Informatics, and member of the editorial board of Applied Energy, Energy and Buildings, the Journal of Building Performance Simulation, and Building Simulation Journal.

Pieter’s main research emphasis is on thermal building performance simulation, and its use in the building services and engineering community. He also has a track record in building performance monitoring in their actual day-to-day context which enables critical reflection on the validity of computational results, and their meaning in building operation and facility management practice. He has authored over 300 publications on various topics related to building performance, including the seminal academic book Building Performance Analysis which was published in 2018 by Wiley and which is the third book to be endorsed by IBPSA. He has been involved in the Beyond All Limits conference from its start, attending both BAL 2017 in Ankara and BAL 2022 in Caserta before joining BAL 2025.

Talk Outline

At BAL 2025, Pieter will speak about the long-standing challenges pertaining to the data exchange between building information models (BIM) and building energy models (BEM). His talk will be based on his long track record in this area, dating back to his postdoc work at GeorgiaTech with Godfried Augenbroe and Charles “Chuck” Eastman, and his more recent work on the subject in the context of the IEA Annex 91 ‘openBIM for energy efficient buildings’ and the Swedish oBtoB project (openBIM to BEM).

In the talk, Pieter will distinguish between some of the main approaches towards data exchange and will try to get across the main challenges that come with these approaches.

After this talk, it is hoped that the audience will have a better idea of a number of complex technical concepts such as IFC, interoperability, open and closed BIM, and some of the pitfalls that await when working with BIM and BEM.