Museums, galleries and their carbon footprints

The emissions trading scheme may have been shelved in Australia for the near term (though watch this space after the ascendancy of Julia Gillard to the PM’s position) but museums and galleries, just as businesses, need to treat a low carbon and energy efficient economy as inevitable.

And what Copenhagen did achieve, although it appeared to be a failure as a climate change summit, was a global agreement to limit temperature rises to 2 degrees. To meet this target is going to require transformational changes to the world economy, and therefore inevitably to the way museums and galleries operate. The GLAM sector is going to be in a much stronger position if it can take control of its preparedness for this rather than wait for the inevitable government dictate.

And whilst this is partly about the reactionary component, i.e. checking the resilience of museums to the effects of warmer temperatures, heavier rainfall and less predictable weather patterns, and the related risks, it is also about being proactive in reducing each organisation’s carbon footprint.

I find colleagues’ eyes begin to glaze over at this stage, as it all appears too hard. So what can we learn from the rest of the world in this regard? I checked out the UK where they are substantially ahead of Australian thinking on this issue. Museums are looking to establish their carbon footprint and then to do something about reducing it, both to save money and also to be eligible for grants that are available for those that are proactive in this area.

Carbon footprints treat an organisation’s carbon emissions in three parts:

1. Direct emissions from the organisation which, for museums relate to their own boilers and fuel used by museum vehicles
2. Indirect emissions from electricity or gas purchased by the museum
3. Indirect emissions from sources outside the museum’s control, such as staff and visitors getting to the museum, waste disposal and suppliers emissions

The first stage is to establish what these are, and the benchmark for this is the Victoria and Albert Museum, which claims to be the first museum to have calculated their footprint in 2007/08. They found that not unexpectedly 82% of their emissions arise from utilities.  However it is interesting to see the breakdown of this, namely 29% of this being for lighting compared to 63% for heating, cooling and control of relative humidity - interesting in that we tend to forget how much energy lights use and then of course how much they contribute to warming up air and thus requiring more energy for cooling. The balance of the carbon footprint at the V&A is consumed by IT (11%), touring exhibitions (5%) and staff travel (2%).

Having established a carbon footprint (and bear in mind that it helps to have sub metering so the breakdown between lights, HVAC and IT use can be identified), then the next stage is to do something about it. This should be about reducing energy use, not about using renewable energy sources or carbon offsetting.

Again check out how the V&A has achieved a 20% reduction in their carbon footprint between 2005 and 2009. They have done this through using low energy lighting on time clocks, low energy environmental controls and a combined heat and power system, known in the business as CHP.

Perhaps the most impressive part of this is how they are implementing ongoing savings as they progressively refurbish the Museum. New gallery projects now optimise the use of daylight, minimise solar gain, use intelligent ventilation and heating strategies and avoid humidification and cooling. It is a model all museums and galleries can benefit from actively considering.

Julian Bickersteth
International Conservation Services

Using the museum building to its full potential

The role museums play in society seems to be much under discussion in these recessionary times. One US wag has suggested they should be turned into soup kitchens, using their generally large, warm and centrally located buildings to look after inner city down and outs. The interesting broader question is whether it is entirely ethical for museums to focus on ‘higher’ aesthetic/educational/intellectual matters whilst basic social needs go unmet.

I must confess to being a bit bored by such discussions, not because they are not valid but because they lead nowhere. It’s like discussing whether the NSW Government should have contributed $3 million to completing St Mary’s Cathedral Sydney a few years back to allow two spires to be erected. No benefit whatsoever to the adjacent down and outs but a mighty aesthetic improvement.

What DOES intrigue me is what more we could do with the spaces in museums by leveraging off the subject matter they contain. I’ve always loved the idea that the Royal Society for the Arts in the UK has had of setting up coffee conversations in Starbucks. As I understand it, they place a convenor/facilitator in a high street Starbucks at a regular appointed time, who choses a subject and invites the coffee drinkers to stay a while and get into a good debate.

Wouldn’t museums be such good places to do that, acting as convening places and drawing people into lively discussions, using one of their exhibits as a focal or starting point. It doesn’t have to be for ever – just something that is tried and if it takes off so much the better.

Queen Victoria rises again on the Tamar

Just back from a quick visit to Launceston, where exciting things are happening at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. The Museum extended itself onto the Inveresk Railyard site 8 years ago, and since then there has been some pressure to relinquish the original Museum site in Royal Park to avoid the ineffiencies of a dual campus. However Patrick Filmer Sankey, who was appointed director in 2008 has conceived of the idea of clearly separating functions, so that the fine and decorative art and design collections (the Gallery function) are retained at Royal Park and the historical and natural science collections (the Museum function) are exhibited at the Inveresk site.

The active support of the City Council and the State Government has quickly seen $7m thrown into the equation, and the Royal Park site has now closed for its revamp with a late 2010 opening planned.

The even more exciting thing about this plan is that it will allow all the internal additions and linings from this late Victorian /Edwardian purpose built gallery to be removed and the original spaces reclaimed. I had a dusk tour with project development manager Glenda King yesterday showing me tantalizing glimpses of what is going to be possible.

So with the revamped QVMAG , probably the country’s finest regional gallery, coming on line next year along with the privately funded MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) at Morilla on the outskirts of Hobart, Tasmania is going to be a significant cultural destination.

Energy consumption in museums and galleries– what can we do about it?

Giving the IIC Forbes Lecture in 2004 Andreas Burmester, the director of the Doerner Institute in Munich, obliquely identified where he felt that current environmental standards for museums and galleries were going wrong. He had just finished acting as consultant to a new art gallery in Munich, the Museum Brandhorst, and had realised he had unwittingly been part of creating an unsustainable example of an environmentally controlled space.

Whilst the standard parameters he had dictated for climate and light levels( 22 degrees C, 55% RH, 50 lux for works on paper etc) had been achieved, the cost of maintaining them in a heavily glazed modern building, is massive. In addition, the technology involved, using computerised louvres and a vast HVAC plant, meant that the moment there was a powercut the entire system would close down and the building would essentially become an oven in summer and a freezer in winter. Contrast this with the existing 19th century art gallery, the Alte Pinakothek, which is not only extremely efficient to heat by hot air from the boilers in the cellars radiating up through the walls, but also thanks to its 6 ft thick walls, able to maintain internal conditions should there be a power cut for a significant time thanks to the thermal mass of the building.

But where to now, having created the international environmental standards that any self respecting gallery must comply with in order to be eligible for loans? The bad news is that there is unlikely to be any immediate loosening of these standards. However the possible good news is that the UK Council of Museum Directors have commissioned a review of the standards in the light of the energy requirements that result from them, and MAY end up recommending some relaxation of them.

Meanwhile, there is lots of good stuff going on at an individual institutional level to see how energy costs can be reduced, whilst maintaining acceptable conditions for storage and display of collections, the so called ‘preservation equation’. Both the National Museum of Australia and the Australian War Memorial have undertaken significant research into the capacity of various material types to cope with more relaxed environmental standards. And the State Library of Victoria experimented with turning its HVAC system in the book stacks off in October 2008 to gauge the effect on the environment and energy savings.

We’ve teamed up with leading environmental engineers Steensen Varming to help institutions look at ways in which they can potentially reduce their energy costs whilst still maintaining their collections in optimum conditions, and I expect to be writing more about this shortly.