Is there enough effort in the UK devoted to investigating innovative ways of reducing energy demand of buildings?

  No. There has been a significant increase in effort directed to reducing energy demand of buildings in recent years following decades of near neglect. However, the effort is still not sufficient to develop innovative ways to reap the economic, security and quality of life benefits that would be available from radical improvements.

  A notable feature of the lack of innovation is the startling reluctance to engage with specialists, especially designers, and to use their experience of the last 3 decades and the considerable expertise that has developed. A wealth of expertise exists in the UK—often referred to as equivalent to the English carthorse, which evolved largely due to the inefficiency of the English cart—and we could respect it and use it as other countries do. Another part of the equation is the tendency to succumb to lobbying by small sectors of vested interests on behalf of the status quo, which has often successfully been able to resist beneficial innovation. It is about time the megaphone was passed on, some people have had it for too long.

  Increasing amounts of effort have gone into marketing at the expense of developing and using specialist knowledge. This presents us with a significant danger that we will revisit old mistakes and continue to miss opportunities. One glaring problem is the tendency to see "sustainability and energy efficiency" as adding technology and cost to buildings.[10] In reality it is more likely to involve doing the simple things well with minimum or no extra cost and considerable cost and energy savings in use. There is ample experience and information on this but we don't use it.

INCENTIVES

  We do need thorough information on the means to incentivise different sectors of the industry. Clients, developers and designers will have different priorities and these need to be better understood if we are to create the necessary innovative culture.

  Planning—Some sectors of the construction industry have become very powerful. Planning legislation must address the rights of people to a good quality, healthy and affordable built environment and provide the incentive or the regulatory framework to provide it. It may be that planning laws need to be fundamentally changed to prevent excessive slipping of standards. Where planning permission is only granted for a limited time period it is easier to maintain standards at contemporary levels. Where the only motivation to raise standards is legislation then legislation must be strict and enforced. A notable concern is that affordable housing is essentially poorer quality housing with lesser standards in most regards than non-affordable housing. There are serious ethical and environmental problems with this. In many other countries the housing quality is maintained and the families are subsidised. We need to consider these options

  Resource conservation—The Renewables Obligation has encouraged new investment from diverse sources into the field of energy supply. Many years ago Scandinavian utilities recognised that the increasing costs and liabilities associated with building new generating plant meant there was potentially more profit available from energy conservation or Negawatts.[11] They distributed free energy efficient bulbs and thereby freed up the available generating capacity to do more. Negawatts are attractive and often cheaper than watts. There is currently a requirement on energy suppliers to promote conservation and it is unclear how the new scheme (2005-08) will operate. It would be interesting to investigate whether strong incentives (negarocs?) could encourage new investment in conservation.

  Resource conservation has suffered from poor image and public relations. The hair shirt. It is widely interpreted as meaning that we should expect less eg in the way of quality/heating/cooling or space. Communicating the benefits as well as the importance of doing more with less by focusing on using resources more effectively and reducing waste is vitally important. This is fundamental to the required culture shift.

  One suggestion was carbon rationing—an option may be to incentivise—initially in the commercial and public sector—by charging significantly higher amounts for energy/CO₂ emissions over a certain "good practice", limit. If introduced on a regulatory basis or accompanied by design advice it could be a powerful incentive. Once established in principal then the limit can be reduced over time.[12]

Can you point to good practice elsewhere which could be applied to the UK?

  A number of initiatives from outside the UK have the potential to contribute to much needed innovation. They address a range of issues.

Flagship Projects

  In a number of countries major development, that has the support at highest level of Local Authorities and Government, is improving public awareness of the practical, pragmatic and widespread benefits of energy and sustainability considerations. Too often these considerations are still seen in the UK as luxury issues.

Design

  A number of projects have addressed the issue of the value added by design. This is a slowly increasing feature of discussion on health and well-being, productivity and learning and teaching effectiveness.

Costs

  There is increasing amount of information available on the costs of sustainable building that undermines traditional arguments about what can and cannot be afforded.

FLAGSHIP PROJECTS

  Germany, Sweden, Holland and Finland have all been developing mainstream housing/mixed use projects of a significant scale—to standards in excess of mandatory requirements. The planning, commercial and research importance of these projects mean that they all have commitment at the highest level. In general these go beyond simply energy considerations to look at holistic solutions to cost, transport, community engagement, resource conservation, biodiversity enhancement, pollution abatement and health. Often they are looking at using efficiencies primarily alongside economies of scale and closed loops such that outputs from one process—such as waste—are used as inputs to another—such as heating. The potential is significant. They have had varying degrees of success but the better examples could usefully inform our own plans. We have no such foresighted plans in the UK and the recommendations of the Sustainable Task Force on Sustainable Construction are woefully unambitious in this regard. I would gladly organise a tour of such schemes.

DESIGN

  There is still little attention given to the contribution of designers to energy conservation and indeed to health and productivity.

  A German initiative to promote solar energy opted to support interdisciplinary design rather then solar technology.[13] The consequence was buildings that cost 69 per cent to 76 per cent of the typical reference buildings and had an energy demand of 47 per cent to 57 per cent of the standard. Given that on average 0.1 per cent of the cost of a building is spent on design, the added value implications are enormous.

  We have the potential to deliver considerable energy efficiency by addressing this and a range of issues at the design stage including, importantly, power demand which is rarely discussed. Power demand and delivery itself will become increasingly important as part of an overall strategy to reduce energy use. The actual amount of power delivered to buildings can have a significant effect on energy losses in terms of standby and transmission losses. Sweden is attempting to reduce the amount of power used in its buildings and Danish regulations also have requirements that aim to limit power. In the future, it will be more important to measure the total amount of power a building demands and the energy a building consumes rather than simply the

amount of energy consumed per square metre. This will put the onus on the efficient use of space and infrastructure as well as the efficient use of energy.

  Another example of the added value of good design is the notable feature of some recent exemplar buildings is the shift to passive design and consequent transfer of costs from mechanical services (often 30 per cent or more of a building cost) to form and fabric. Examples include Glencoe 9 per cent, Arup Campus 5 per cent and McLaren Community Leisure Centre 16 per cent (extremely good for a swimming pool). There will be others for which I don't have data.

COST

  Little is really known about the cost of sustainable building. Many beneficial features have little or no additional capital cost but deliver cost benefits in use. Estimates based on American projects assessed through the BREEAM equivalent, LEED, initially indicated an increase of 0-3 per cent in capital cost for the lower ratings and up to 6.5 per cent for the highest ratings. More recently a review of 138 buildings with varying commitment to the environment found them to be indistinguishable.[14] Significantly more research on UK buildings is needed to provide relevant information to clients and builders. Evidently there is the need for a skills base that can assist in the delivery German and American research indicates that increasing design time to integrate sustainability at the outset tends to save on capital and running costs whilst late considerations tend to increase costs significantly.

  A significant aspect of the growing interest in sustainable building design can be attributed to the recognition on the part of clients, that there are direct economic benefits from sustainable building. The initial output from PPP/PFI projects suggests that despite much evidence in favour of using whole life costs, many contractors still seek short term gains as well, regardless of longer term expense.

  In the German regulations requirements for improvements are tied to an economic efficiency criterion, ie the value of the energy savings must recoup the cost of the measure during its normal life expectancy. This avoids the tendency to apply prohibitively short payback times or to apply luxury measures over cheaper ones.[15] We have not done this in the UK and find very expensive technology such as PV with relatively short life and high maintenance take priority over educating the industry in delivering the simple things well that once adopted into the culture—like air tightness—have a genuine building lifetime benefit.

  In the Netherlands there is a philosophy of shifting the tax burden from labour and capital based income towards the use of the environment. This is reflected in a range of national and regional subsidies mainly for energy saving including the current energy tax rate of 20-30 per cent (depending on fuel). These subsidies change quite often. This is part of a rise in enlightened attitudes to development economics which is likely to see more inclusion of externalities—such as pollution costs—and could create a level playing field for benign products. There is now a move towards forms of social and environmental costing to provide a framework for sustainable development and there is real activity to develop indicators that relate economic change to quality of life. The EU 5th Environmental Action Programme committed members to developing pilot systems of "environmental adjusted national accounts" by 1995, with a view to adopting them by 2000.

EXPANDED COMMENT ON TASK GROUP

  With respect to the Sustainable Task Group Report which was supposed to look to future possibilities, the ideas they put forward are not innovative and there is no discussion of why these have not been implemented that might inform the debate. Also they:

(i)  give no consideration to regulation and guidance outside the UK [including that for existing buildings] despite the fact that we lag significantly behind other countries;

(ii)  give no consideration to best practice in the UK;

(iii)  fail to adequately acknowledge leading edge organisations in a number of important areas;

(iv)  fail to make the necessary links between planning and building regulations which go beyond them being only "complimentary";

(v)  fail to address issues of pollution and health which are fully debated and increasingly legislated in Scandinavia and beyond;

(vi)  give little consideration to the opportunity to design out inefficiencies instead looking to outdated "end-of-pipe" solutions;

(vii)    fail to properly address the issue of cost which dominates the debate in many respects and on which   significant advances could be made;

(viii)

  promote a centralist strategy on materials, timber and policy—potentially in this context—of the   ill-informed. In respect of policy it may be a result of context but our work for the Scottish   Executive recommended the opposite. We consider it most productive if different departments   procure research in common as it is more inclined to encourage joined up thinking and effective   considered action. However there is evidently a need to ensure that there is agreement on resourcing   the outcome recommendations if positive actions are to result. There are problems in this regard.

  The conclusion of the report is targets set too low, weak role of regulation, inability to engage the true power of design, the economy or planning regulation, and it opens up the potential for unintended, undesirable consequences.

11   Replacing a 100W bulb with a 20W bulb providing the same light output (lux) means that the required power has been reduced by 80W. This has become known as the production of Negawattts. Similarly water conservation measures result in Negalitres. Back

12   See the Dutch Energy Performance Coefficient for the ratchet comparison. Back

13   Halliday SP. Sustainable Construction CPD 13-Cost Issues Gaia Research 2004. Back

14   Matthiessen and Morris Costing Green: A comprehensive cost database and budgeting methodology-Davis Langdon Adamson 2004. Back

15   Halliday SP; Stevenson F (2004) Sustainable Construction and the Regulatory Framework-A Thinkpiece Gala Research ISBN 1-904680-19-4 The full document can be downloaded at www.GaiaGroup.org Back