Fashion Not Function

Posted on May 2, 2013 by Doug King

The ridiculous fashion for urban wind turbines is still showing no sign of abating with the erection of BSkyB’s new turbine at its West London studio complex. Perhaps the continuing political insistence for ineffective on-site renewable generation is to blame. It is not just successive national governments and fashion-following local planning regulations, but all too often we find that corporates are now playing to the populism of green. This collective disregard for engineering reality forces building owners and developers to pay for sub-optimal solutions and forces architects and engineers to try and justify the essentially unjustifiable in defence of what has been forced on them. AJ Footprint 25th April

If you ask a primary school class where we should build wind turbines, the answers usually range from “on top of hills” to “out at sea”, anywhere it is windy. By the time those children arrive at the final year of their architectural degrees the answer has often become “attached to my building as an icon”.

Unfortunately the very nature of buildings is to disrupt the smooth flow of wind which is essential for efficient energy generation. The increased friction due to surface roughness in urban areas reduces the potential power in the wind dramatically. At the height of BSkyB’s turbine, it is only half that of rural areas. In city centres the power available may be just 15% of the open country equivalent (full explanation here).

This location effect is generally accounted for by applying a capacity factor to the theoretical maximum generation of a turbine. The rule of thumb for UK wind power is to assume a capacity factor of 30%-35% for good onshore installations. The generation figures quoted for BSkyB indicate a capacity factor of just less than 15%. Thus the same turbine, at the same cost, could generate more than twice as much electricity if it was not shackled to a building. This doubling in output would more than offset the grid distribution losses (around 6%) to deliver the electricity back to BSkyB in West London.

Two identical Enercon E70 Turbines. The one on the left produces 3.5GWh whilst the one on the right produces 5.7GWh.

Two identical Enercon E70 Turbines. The one on the left produces 3.5GWh pa whilst the one on the right produces 5.7GWh pa. The difference is due to surface friction.

Apart from the very obvious branding potential, urban wind turbines have little going for them. It is time that politicians, national, local and corporate, stopped interfering and let engineers and architects make the best technical systems decisions for genuinely sustainable development.

Measure Progress Not Just Carbon

Posted on April 28, 2013 by Doug King

I have been thinking for a little while about the suitability or otherwise of the metrics we use to measure sustainability. Given peoples’ reactions at a few meetings recently, including the Edge Debate on the Politics of Carbon Measurement and a conversation with the UK Consul for Climate Change in Chongqing, I think that the time has come to look seriously at this issue.

Presently we attempt to measure the impacts of what we build, but we rarely measure the beneficial outcomes. Therefore we risk focussing attention on all that is bad and forgetting the good. Taken to extremes we could end up going backwards socially and economically in order to address the political imperative to deliver zero (or at least very low) carbon buildings. For example, many sub-saharan africans live in housing that would easily satisfy the Zero Carbon Hub’s definition. However if we were to adopt housing of this standard in the UK it would not be considered social progress. This rather exaggerated example highlights the need to find some form of metric that acknowledges the benefits of expending some carbon in certain circumstances in order to deliver social and economic progress.

I was involved a few years ago in a new headquarters building for CAFOD in Lambeth. The building followed closely on the heels of two other charity headquarters, Heelis, the National Trust HQ and the Woodland Trust HQ, and it received comparatively little attention. Perhaps this was because the CAFOD building was mechanically ventilated and cooled, whereas the others were natural ventilation exemplars. CAFOD had to be mechanically cooled as the tight urban site available required a very high occupancy density to accommodate the entire organisation, whereas the other buildings were on suburban or extra-urban sites with plenty of space for low occupancy density and natural ventilation. On the face of it this means that the CAFOD building was both more expensive and had higher carbon emissions. However these standard metrics of cost and carbon per square metre of space do not account for how the buildings can subsequently be used. I decided to look again at the buildings in terms of the occupancy. Occupancy rates are after all what office tenants will be most interested in. The results completely reversed the ranking of the three buildings as shown below.

Whilst the metric of carbon per desk or carbon per worker is certainly much more useful than carbon per square metre in linking impact to business targets, an even better metric would link carbon to a measure of business success, such as productive hours or added value. Thus at a stroke we would be able to distinguish between well designed environmental buildings that reduce carbon and promote productivity and those that pay scant attention to the design and bolt on EcoBling to achieve the carbon reduction.

Take hospitals as another example. Lots of good work has been done in the past on identifying the quality design factors that influence patient outcomes, by providing a better working environment or recovery environment. The NHS metric for energy efficiency is presently kWh/m3 per year. Using such measures as targets can create perverse incentives. A hospital could economise on carbon by reducing ventilation rates, but this would increase recovery times and cross infection rates. A better metric for the NHS would surely be kWh per bed, to account for spatial efficiency, but in order to measure the real success of hospitals we should link energy efficiency to patient outcomes. Perhaps a metric of kWh per patient discharged. The shorter the stay in hospital the better the outcome for both the patient and the NHS and the less energy expended in achieving the outcome.

Designing these new metrics will be complicated to get right. As soon as any measure is adopted as a target it creates an incentive and we must ensure that the perverse incentives in the system are as few and as little impact as possible. However any work in this area has got to be better than simply sticking with metrics that incentivise unrealistic outcomes for the businesses that have to occupy the buildings. If those of us who work in sustainability want to see positive outcomes from our efforts then we must find means to set the importance of carbon reduction within social and economic context that will deliver better business outcomes too.

China’s Conservation Culture

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Doug King

Having spent the last 2 weeks in Chongqing, China’s fastest growing industrial city, I realise on returning to the UK last week just how cosy and indolent our western economies have become. China is a powerhouse of making and doing, whilst we luxuriate in our undemanding jobs, manipulating imaginary paper wealth whilst ignorantly squandering natural resources in our disposable consumer society.

It is forecast that some 300 million Chinese will join the middle classes this decade. This is in addition to China having the fastest growing urban population in the world. The pressure on Chinese cities and their economy is phenomenal, but they are preparing for it. Our guidebook to Chongqing, published in 2011, lists only one metro line. We arrived to find that they already have four, with seven anticipated by 2015! Compare this with the 20 plus years it has taken to get London’s Crossrail underway.

But it is not just the phenomenal rate of development that I believe will set China apart, it is their culture of conservation and re-use.

Walk down a street in any Chinese city and you can find people who can repair, re-purpose or recycle just about everything you can imagine, from building materials to mobile phones. Demolition sites are immediately picked over for re-usable materials and you can find plenty of trade in recovered reinforcement and plywood shuttering from concrete. Cardboard packaging is collected from high street shops and carried off in huge bundles by little old ladies.

All the litter bins in public places, not just on the street, but out of town too, are all segregated for recyclable and non-recyclable, as you would find in Germany or other more enlightened Euro countries. On corners throughout the cities you will find the street cleaners sorting and packaging up the waste from the litter bins for re-use or recycling.

With a street food culture such as China’s you would expect to find large quantities of disposable food containers in the litter bins. However, you will also find people collecting the containers, clearly for re-use. One might question the hygiene implications of such a trade, but it is unquestionably avoiding substantial quantities of plastic going to landfill, reducing the costs of packaging for the food businesses and providing a subsistence income for the recyclers.

This culture of avoiding waste has clearly grown out of necessity. However, if this culture can be retained and nurtured, particularly in relation to Chinese manufacturing industry and the emerging middle class then there is no question that it will result in a fully developed economy that is far more resource efficient than we can boast in the West.

Whilst we in the West merely debate the principles of a circular economy, the Chinese live and breath it. The disposable consumer culture of the West is simply not for them, and long may it remain so.

Doug is Off to Teach in China

Aside

Doug is heading to China next week to be inaugurated as a Visiting Professor at Chongqing University and to attend the launch of their International Centre for Low Carbon Building Research.

Energy Incoherence

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Doug King

This has been an interesting month for revealing the effects of the lack of a coherent UK energy policy.

Three fossil fuel power stations have closed; Cockenzie in Scotland (1GW Coal), Didcot A (2GW coal) and Fawley (1GW oil). These recent closures bring the total closures since December 2012 to 7.5GW accounting for about 10% of UK generating capacity.

Didcot A Power Station These stations were built at a time when we didn’t recognise the damage that carbon dioxide does to our ecosystem, but we did recognise the importance of domestic industry. The UK had, and still has, extensive coal reserves and our power stations were built to exploit this and create growth in UK industrial capacity at a time of optimism.

The closures occurred not because the stations were failing, but due to European legislation on air pollution and a hike in UK carbon taxation. These stations could have continued in operation if pollution control had been installed, or until 2015 in any case under the European Large Combustion Plant Directive. However it appears that the majority of operators have chosen instead to run them flat out during the profitable winter period and shut them down on the eve of a new tax on fossil fuel. The ‘Carbon Floor Price’, to be introduced on 1st April, has a stated purpose of making fossil fuel generation uncompetitive. Congratulations Mr Osborne, you’ve succeeded!

In the same month, the UK’s largest remaining coal mine, Daw Mill Colliery was pushed over the edge of financial viability by an underground fire and closed. The price of coal on the international market has collapsed, pushed down by a glut of american coal caused by their rush to shale gas. Private electricity generators will of course buy coal at the lowest cost available, making the UK coal industry ultimately unviable.

A total of 1000 energy industry jobs have been lost in March.

It is estimated that despite the closure of the majority of coal power stations by 2015, our reliance on imported coal to generate electricity will rise by 70% as the UK coal industry collapses. Of course these power station closures will also increase our reliance on gas to generate electricity. We already import half of gas consumed in the UK and this is expected to rise to 70% by 2019.

We saw an example this month, coincidentally on the day that Didcot A closed, of our sensitivity to gas imports. The UK-Belgian gas pipeline suffered a fault in a dewatering pump and had to be shut down for half a day. During that period the price of gas jumped 50% to an all time high, as it became temporarily scarce. During one of the coldest weeks we’ve experienced for a while, our national reserve of gas was reduced to just 36 hours.

Surely a national energy policy should address energy security and jobs as well as carbon.

Government seems to be banking on new gas generation coming along to fill the gap until the new nuclear power stations come on line. However its policies are focused on renewable energy and its rhetoric is all about beating up energy companies to keep bills low. It has taken its eye off the ball with regard to energy security, jobs and UK industry.

We have a privatised, fragmented energy system whose individual players won’t make necessary investments in new capacity unless they are confident of a return. If Government will not give them that confidence through coherent policy then they won’t invest until market forces drive energy prices sufficiently high. Once electricity becomes a scarce commodity the price will increase, that is the way of the market. If the lights start going out then maybe Government will be happier to discuss the subsidies energy companies are asking for in the absence of policy, but of course, by then, subsidies will be unnecessary.