Cost Planning for Emerging Technology in Existing Buildings:

The technology is rarely the risk. The sequencing almost always is.

Every year, new technology arrives at buildings designed decades before anyone planned for it. Liquid cooling arrives at a data hall built for air. A robot fleet arrives at a warehouse wired for handheld scanners. A battery system arrives at a building whose fire protection never contemplated thermal runaway.

In most cases the technology works as intended. What decides whether the project succeeds, on budget and on schedule, is whether the building, and the people pricing and planning the work, were ready to receive it.

This book is written from the cost consultant's side of that problem. It shows how to turn an exciting piece of technology into properly scoped, honestly priced, deliverable construction work.

Ten technologies, one recurring pattern

• Liquid cooling retrofits in existing data centers

• Humanoid robots leaving the robot cell

• Autonomous mobile robots in existing warehouses

• Battery storage and the fire code

• Mass timber vertical additions to existing buildings

• EV fleet charging depots

• Reality capture: verifying existing conditions before design

• Structural health monitoring for bridges and buildings

• Rooftop solar and structural load

• A counterpoint on first-of-a-kind green steel and green hydrogen

Built for practitioners

Each chapter closes with a Cost Consultant's Verdict and a worked estimate structured to RICS NRM2. Together they work through five questions:

• Where does the risk sit in the cost plan?

• Which survey, audit, or assessment resolves it, and when?

• Who should carry the risk until it is resolved?

• What does a defensible contingency look like, built from evidence, not habit?

• What does the client need to see?

The book also includes a one-page checklist of those five questions, an NRM2-to-MasterFormat crosswalk for North American readers, a glossary, and full source notes. Figures are traced to identifiable sources, a company's figures about its own project are labelled as such, and illustrative numbers are clearly marked as illustrative.

Who it is for

Quantity surveyors, cost consultants, and project managers asked to price a technology that did not exist when they trained. It is equally useful for the owners, developers, and facility managers on the other side of that advice, who want to know why the survey comes before the design.