BILL WATTS

Bill Watts is an engineer with a background of environmental engineering in buildings and the sustainable use of resources and energy. Having done a degree in Zoology in 1980he joined Max Fordham and Partners, a firm of building services engineers, where he is a Senior Partner. He has been involved in the design, delivery and operation of the systems [heating, ventilation, power etc] in many building types and is very familiar with the construction and property industry.
In 2000 he worked on a commission to deliver a Zero Carbon Office for a renewable energy developer and created designs for energy systems that included wind, solar and biomass. This provided an insight of the capabilities of these systems to meet energy needs at a local, national and international levels, and introduced the issue of food and land use into this equation.
In 2009 he was a founding member of the Sahara Forest Project, an initiative to create food, water and power from seawater and solar energy in desert areas. He designed and delivered a pilot facility in Qatar and a permanent one in Jordan that produces high value produce in seawater cooled greenhouses. He produced proposals for other schemes in Tunisia and Australia that included other local industrial processes into the SFP circular use of resources.
In 2015 to 2020 he was a visiting professor to the Bartlett on the use of biological systems in buildings.
He has been involved in advocacy of policy around the provision of heat for buildings and now involved in the pivoting away from combustion systems towards electrically driven heat pumps, a challenge that is as much about political, economic and human factors as the engineering intricacies.