Sarah E. Maston, 2026-27 ASHRAE President, introduces her presidential theme “Changing the Game: Retrofitting for Resilience” at Chillventa CONGRESS in Nuremberg on 12 October, turning a deeply personal, sports-driven keynote into a call for owners, engineers, manufacturers and code officials to act as one team on making existing buildings more efficient, healthy and resilient.
Maston builds the talk around lessons from football (soccer). As a teenager, her family moved from suburban Chicago to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where her new high school had no girls’ team until the district approved one a month later. The team lost far more than it won at first, then went undefeated in her senior year by learning to play together. She also shares that she found HVAC by chance, through a college elective, and has spent nearly 30 years in the building industry.
The technical case rests on one figure: 80% of the buildings that will exist in 2050 already exist today. Maston’s game plan has three parts. First, building codes, supported by the ASHRAE Building Code Assessment Tool (BCAT), already piloted in Kenya and Lebanon, with work underway in India and Brazil. Second, existing building commissioning, backed by a new resource page at ashrae.org/president that gathers the relevant ASHRAE standards and guidelines. Third, gamification: ASHRAE HVAC Hero, a video game in which players act as a facility manager, answer maintenance calls and cut building energy use while learning ASHRAE standards. The keynote ends with the audience chanting “Get in the game” as each stakeholder group is called on.
The day opens with a welcome address by Andrea Voigt, Vice President P&I Affairs, ESG & Communication, Danfoss Climate Solutions, who shows how the narrative of EU policy has shifted from climate to competitiveness and resilience. She points to the EU Electrification Action Plan goal of 4 million heat pumps per year by 2030, up from 2.4 million in 2025, a sharp F-Gas quota cut in 2027, and Union origin requirements for hydronic heat pumps in public procurement. Her conclusion: value in HVACR is moving from supplying compliant products to enabling safe, efficient lifecycle performance.
At the start of his talk at the ASERCOM + EPEE Symposium, EPEE Director General Russell Patten instantly livens up the room with a joke, taking off his tie. He presents the EU regulatory landscape as interlinked and hard to navigate for an industry that needs clarity on where to invest, and welcomes the first political recognition of cooling in the European Commission’s State of the Union address, which treats heat pumps and air conditioning as essential to climate adaptation after a summer of heatwaves linked to nearly 40,000 deaths in Europe.
Chillventa CONGRESS takes place today at NCC Ost, one day before the Chillventa 2026 trade fair opens (13-15 October). The programme runs in four streams: the ASERCOM + EPEE Symposium, Heat Pumping Technologies, the 9th Innovation Day for Refrigeration Technology and Data Centers.
“I fully acknowledge that I don’t have all the answers, but I show up. I listen. I learn, I try new things, occasionally I fall down, but I get right back up again,” said Maston.
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