Alasdair Young

Alasdair holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from Cambridge University, joining Buro Happold in 2005 as a specialist in energy and infrastructure systems.

Alasdair is part of our Directorship, working with the Cities teams in the UK, US, Europe, Middle East and India, helping develop their energy consulting offer. He is also continuing to bolster our global climate change consulting services.

He has worked on projects from individual building scale, campus scale as well as city wide energy strategies and infrastructure projects. He has led a variety of projects through different stages including optioneering, feasibility, scheme design, detailed design and procurement. This work covers a variety of sectors and technologies including wind, solar PV, district heating and cooling, biomass and combined heat and power. Alasdair is passionate about infrastructure systems which can enable sustainable and low carbon development, particularly when utility systems for energy and water can be designed to ‘close the loop’ with materials, waste, and wastewater cycles.

As well as technical expertise Alasdair has experience of developing energy plans and techno-economic models of low carbon energy and infrastructure systems. He has also developed business cases for funding and procurement and has experience of the planning system and major re-development projects. Recent work has included energy masterplans for Birmingham, Camden, Islington, Cornwall and Havering councils as well as developing heat network projects with Plymouth, Westminster, Islington, Camden, Cornwall and Redbridge councils and Edinburgh, Glasgow, St Andrews, Plymouth and Lincoln Universities.

Alasdair’s major project experience has focused on delivery of new sustainable utility systems which has given him strong insights into the energy services and multi-utility market place from both technical and commercial perspectives. Key projects involving this approach include the London 2012 Olympic Park, Brent Cross Cricklewood, Hamad Bin Khalifa Medical Corporation Medical City (Qatar), UCL East and Tun Razak Exchange (Malaysia).

Alasdair has worked on a number of building projects which used innovative approaches to energy and sustainability. These include: low carbon hempcrete based housing in Elmswell in Suffolk, Palestra: the UK’s first fuel cell CCHP office for Transport for London in Southwark, The David Attenborough Building Refurbishment for Cambridge University and the Samba Bank HQ in Riyadh.

As well as this project based work Alasdair has led a number of policy and research projects, including work for London First and the Greater London Authority and for the Energy Technologies Institute and National Grid.