Environmental Guidelines

I recently blogged on the issue of AICCM’s environmental guidelines for museums and galleries, and the awards AICCM picked up for them at the Museums Australia conference in Perth last month, both in the Sustainability sector and also the overall award.

We are a bit embarrassed that they are not yet available for public dissemination, but the reality is that until the new standard is released in the UK, as a net borrower of artworks and objects, Australian museums and galleries must wait. We now understand that PAS 198 (the precursor to the new British Standard) is likely to be launched early next year. However there’s nothing easy in this space!

The driver for change has been that current recommended environmental standards for display and storage conditions in museums and galleries rely on significant amounts of energy to keep them constant. Internationally the museum sector is facing a number of challenges, namely: rising energy costs; reduced budgets; and community pressure to be more environmentally sustainable.

These challenges raise two broad questions:

• what are the opportunities/issues around reducing energy use in collection climate control?
• what are the resulting potential impacts on collections (sometimes referred to as the 'preservation equation')?

The current generation of museum professionals have grown up working to the internationally recognised and until recently unassailable standards of 20°C +/- 2°C temperature and 50% +/- 5 % relative humidity. It is these that we are looking to relax.

However the National Gallery in London came out last week with its own view on the issue saying that in fact they are looking to tighten the parameters rather than loosen them to 21°C +/- 1°C in winter and 23°C +/- 1°C in summer and 50% +/- 5 % RH. See their well reasoned argument and indeed a broader background to the issue here.

My strong view is that, although the National Gallery’s old masters may need these very tight parameters, very few other collections do, and that the broad push to get the general standard relaxed must continue.

It’s interesting to see in the same week as the National Gallery’s announcement that the data centre sector is also grappling with the same issues. Data centres use vast amounts of electricity to keep their banks of computers cool.

Apparently these data centres run at 18-21°C to avoid hot spots that might cause the computers to malfunction. Now it has been shown that there is unlikely to be any problem letting computers operate in an environment up to 37°C. Even by relaxing the climate level by 9°C an astonishing $2.16 billion in energy costs would be saved by the sector in the US alone.

Now that is serious money saved and of course serious carbon dioxide emissions too.

Julian Bickersteth
Managing Director
internationalconservationservices

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

Are energy savings in museums now out the window?

I keep reading in the mainstream press that the financial meltdown is going to significantly set back the course of combating global warming, as economies battle to avoid the ravages of recession.

But I think there is a ray of hope in the museum area, namely the potential to reduce energy consumption. Whether or not this is driven by environmental or ethical concerns, museums are at last addressing for the potential cost savings how they combat their love of highly controlled air conditioning systems.

Alright, I plead guilty to being a conservator, the profession that has largely dictated the need for these controls to provide stable environment for collections. But we have done so driven by our mandate to ensure the preservation of these collections and rarely had push-back from the engineers as to the cost of doing so. I wonder how many conservators have ever had a conversation with their museum finance department about the energy cost of achieving the recommended levels of climate control.

But like it or not, we now need to engage, not least to play our part in cutting energy costs. Solar panels and rooftop wind turbines are all well and good but they are expensive to buy and install. In the first instance let’s look at providing low-tech solutions such as proposing double sets of entry doors to keep out the heat and cold, or ensuring all wet coats and brollies are left in cloakrooms to reduce the load on dehumidification systems.

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.