Code for Unsustainable Homes

Posted on August 14, 2010 by Doug King

I’ve been looking at options for sustainable housing recently following a raft of competitions for housing associations who want to achieve Level 5 of the Code for Sustainable Homes. Level 5 requires zero carbon emissions from heating lighting and ventilation, so you have 2 options; install a conventional boiler and enough extra PV to offset the carbon or install a biofuel boiler. Since PV is vastly expensive, this really only leaves the biofuel boiler.

Now, we can design well insulated housing these days with peak heating loads well below 5kW. However, can you find a fully automatic woodfuel boiler below about 15kW in output? No – at these low loads the only option seems to be manually fuelled room heaters. Wood boilers really need to be fired at full power for a reasonable period to avoid problems with tarring up. In other words the smallest automatic boiler is sufficient for 3-4 homes at CSH Level 5 or 6. This is great if you are a housing association and can install common plant and distribution, but what about developing housing for private sale, or even single properties.

The Government insists that all new housing shall be CSH Level 6 by 2016. So, if you are building a single house and don’t fancy inconvenient manual fuelling, you’d be better off not insulating the house at all in order to create sufficient load for long term reliable operation of your woodfuel boiler After all, the fuel is carbon neutral so you get all the credit even if your consumption is excessive. How stupid is that?

I think that this is another example of legislators adopting a voluntary code and forcing it on the market without ever considering the implications.

No More London Please

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Doug King

Another building that has been getting quite a bit of publicity recently for all the wrong reasons is 7 More London. This new office for PriceWaterhouseCooper is the first building in the capital to be awarded a BREEAM Outstanding rating. Yet when you look at it, this conventional, air-conditioned, steel and glass monstrosity probably should not have even passed Part L of the Building Regulations. Its saviour is that elixir of apparent carbon goodness, biodiesel.

Now is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong about an environmental rating system that allows you to construct a building that is just as energy guzzling as all the rest, but then feed its hunger with a scarce and valuable renewable fuel source?

Biodiesel is hardly sustainable, you simply need to look into its impacts on land use and food production to understand that, but it will have a valuable role to play in maintaining essential freight transport in the future. Unless, that is, we consume it all in running un-necessary air-conditioning for poorly designed, inefficient buildings. Actually this is true of all renewable energy sources, we simply cannot generate sufficient to waste it on gratuitous consumption. Oh and by the way I’d love to know how the biodiesel is to be delivered to the building.

The impending energy crisis is likely to be so severe that we will need every drop of fuel available from what-ever source we can find, simply in order to maintain our quality of life. We certainly cannot afford to pretend to be environmentally responsible by rushing to exploit a new resource before anyone else gets there. That’s how we got into so much trouble over fossil fuels.

Hooray for Capitalism

Posted on August 7, 2010 by Doug King

The recent announcement that BPs quarterly profits were down as a result of providing for the Gulf of Mexico disaster hid the fact that BP is still making huge annual profits by anybody’s standards. Following this thought I looked up some financial results for other oil companies.

The top 10 oil companies in the world, on average in 2007/2008, cleared profits of around 0.25% of world GDP! This is even when you allow some adjustment for inaccuracy in reported figures for the Chinese and Iranian state owned oil companies. If you extrapolate these figures to total world oil production and include some guesswork for coal and gas then the global profits from fossil fuels could possibly be around 1% of world GDP. Anyway it is in that sort of region.

Now in his review, Sir Nicholas Stern suggests that the ultimate cost of living with a changed climate could be 5% – 20% of world GDP, but that the cost of mitigating climate change would be of the order of 1% of world GDP. Notice any similarity between these numbers?

From my brief investigation it looks a lot like the cost of paying for remediating the climate damage done by our thirst for fossil fuels is about the same as the profit that the oil companies make from it. So the answer has been there all the time, if we had re-invested the profits from fossil fuels in cleaning up the atmosphere over the last century we might well not be in this fix. Unfortunately the profits of a global resource have not been used to benefit mankind, but have instead lined the pockets of a few – hooray for capitalism.

Not a Glowing Record

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Doug King

The Office of National Statistics has published the UK Carbon Dioxide emissions figures for 2009. They make interesting reading. Basically 2 years of recession has achieved a reduction in Carbon Dioxide emissions 8 times greater than 10 years of continuous change to environmental legislation by the Labour Government.

Whilst on the topic of the effectiveness of legislation, here’s an old piece of information that I haven’t posted yet. In March 2003 Labour created a piece of legislation that required minimum environmental performance standards from all new building work or renovations in the Government Estate. A report by the National Audit Office found that 80% of Government procured building works failed to meet their own standard.

It just goes to show that the power of the individual consumer (even those working in Whitehall) to mitigate carbon emissions through behavioural change is far greater than national governments can achieve by legislation. We must radically re-think the way we approach climate change mitigation.

Consult for Better Policy

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Doug King

Chris Huhne’s first annual statement to Parliament on energy policy correctly identified that reducing demand is far more cost effective than building new generating capacity whether renewable, nuclear or burying the carbon problem in the ground. However, no mention was made of undoing some of the damage done by ill thought out legislation already on the statute books.

For example, should you be tempted by the forthcoming renewable heat incentive to invest in solar water heating, you will not be able to buy a washing machine that can use the carbon free hot water thanks to a botched piece of previous legislation (see here).

Before the Coalition Government introduces further tiers of legislation and incentives they really should re-examine the impact of previous regulations and develop a coherent approach to energy efficiency. We can make substantial inroads into our excessive energy demands through the application of some basic science to the design and refurbishment of buildings and their services. This will yield the desired results far more economically and without the unintended consequences that come about through manipulation of the market for low carbon technologies.

The Coalition now has the opportunity to reverse the approach of the previous Government by actually consulting with industry experts in order to examine the broader implications of their policy ambitions and so avoid such un-intended consequences. I do hope that they take it.