Fixing fuel poverty – is there a healthier way?

Fuel poverty causes misery and ill-health – and alleviating fuel poverty by retrofitting homes could potentially offer valuable savings to the health services. However, different approaches to retrofit are likely to have different impacts on health.

The first in this two-part series, published in Green Building in December 2014, looks at how cold, damp homes can harm people’s heath, and at the evidence to date that retrofit can improve matters.  It also explores some pioneering efforts by concerned health organisations to tackle the ill health of their vulnerable patients where it starts – by fixing their cold homes.

The second part, due to be published in Spring 2015, will look a little more closely at different retrofit strategies, and the risks and benefits to occupants – and to the buildings themselves.

PDF download: Fuel poverty and health – Part 1

Continue reading “Fixing fuel poverty – is there a healthier way?”

Overheating – how can we avoid it? – article from Green Building

This article originally appeared in Green Building, Spring 2014

“Everybody loves the summer time”, as Carole King once sang: everybody that is, except those who are separated from their sweethearts – and those sweltering in stifling buildings that they just can’t get cool.

At its worst, overheating can be a serious – even fatal – health issue, with the very elderly, and babies and small children most vulnerable, and heart attack, stroke, and sudden infant death all possible consequences. But much more commonly it is a discomfort issue, which can affect the usability of buildings, and/or drive people to deploy energy-consuming measures such as artificial cooling.

A building that cannot be cooled down to a comfortable temperature whatever you do is obviously overheating. One that cannot be cooled in a secure and comfortable way (eg, can only be cooled via opening window onto a busy road, or by leaving patio doors open at night), overheats so far as the occupants are concerned. Both are a failure on the part of the design and construction team. Continue reading “Overheating – how can we avoid it? – article from Green Building”

Natural ventilation – does it work?

While mechanical ventilation is sometimes perceived as problematic, expensive and possibly even energy-guzzling, natural ventilation often seems to be seen as – well – “natural” – a safe, old-fashioned,  reliable default solution. In this article for Passive House Plus I had a look at this assumption.

Theoretical modelling suggests that natural ventilation is likely to be rather unreliable, with the same building at risk of both under- and over-ventilation under different weather conditions. But what happens in practice?

The first problem I had was finding some data: there is very little of it.

In the studies I was able to find, it turned out that indoor air quality in naturally ventilated homes (including levels of relative humidity, oxides of nitrogen, and volatile organic compounds, for example) is not what it should be. (I also found some studies from schools raising similar concerns, but there wasn’t room to write about these as well).

For example, a study of 22 homes built to the 2006 Part F regulations for ventilation found that about half of them failed to achieve their recommended background ventilation rate even with all vents open/fans running as intended; pollutants exceeded the guideline levels in a number of them.

But what was really worrying was that when the researchers first arrived, they found that many of the vents were closed, and many of the extract fans (both in bathrooms and kitchens) had been disabled at the isolator. Similar findings appeared in all of the studies I was able to track down. Continue reading “Natural ventilation – does it work?”

Why I think retrofit needs to move off energy bills and on to general taxation

Like many others, I am horrified that the government has scaled back aspects of the Energy Company Obligation mid-programme. You can read about some of the immediate, alarming consequences of this in a report from Inside Housing here.

However, as I’ve said before, it seems to me that long-term  it makes little sense to restrict the national retrofit programme to what can be funded via a charge on energy bills. In summary, this is why:

  • Retrofit is about more than energy bills, it’s about health, education, social welfare and common decency. And about energy security and cutting emissions.
  • Because of the state of our housing and therefore, the scale of the need, a high spend is required.
  • Because of the scale and the range of the benefits, a major retrofit programme would bring tangible revenue savings to a range of bodies such as those tasked with improving economic, health, social welfare and educational outcomes, and delivering on our carbon targets.
  • Paying for retrofit through energy bills is regressive, hitting the poorest proportionally hardest, even at current spending levels.
  • The scale of the spending needs to expand many-fold. This would ramp up the regressiveness. In effect, every household, including the poorest,  would be paying a substantial chunk of the costs for NHS, social welfare etc via their energy bills. This is not only likely to be politically untenable, it also undermines the accepted approach to progressive taxation in this country.
  • The creation of a third party obligation, ‘leaving it to the market’ to decide what to deliver on the basis of a very simplified understanding of costs and benefits, cuts informed stakeholders out of the equation. It excludes them from them any meaningful say over priorities, responsiveness to changing needs, and quality of interventions.
  • It also ignores the ‘beneficiary pays’ principle: health, education and welfare budgets would all benefit considerably, on the back of bill payers.

*The ECO recognises only two parameters of benefit, presumed carbon savings (calculated via RdSAP), and “affordability” again, calculated via RdSAP.

 

Allowable solutions – who are they trying to kid?

This is by way of an open letter to DCLG – which I sent as a covering letter to my response to (questions 1&2 of) the allowable solutions consultation – see previous blog

“I believe the whole idea of (1) “zero carbon” and (2) defining this or any standard not by how well the subject of the standard performs, but how many other people can be bribed to perform well on its behalf, is dreadfully misguided. Continue reading “Allowable solutions – who are they trying to kid?”

The Green Deal and the ECO

This article, originally pubished in Green Building Magazine (Spring 2013) is the second part of my look at the Green Deal, and considers whether and how the Energy Company Obligations (ECOs) might work, and whether and how individual contractors and householders might be able to take advantage of them to help install solid wall insulation, in particular.

I concluded that it was quite unlikely that most private SWI intallations (outside of some defined areas/categories of deprivation) would qualify for 100% funding, because the energy companies will be chasing the cheapest “carbon points” as calculated in SAP – but useful grants might be available for households who were keen enough to fund the difference themselves. It was also not yet clear how smaller and independent contractors might secure ECO funding for their customers, and thus, work for themselves – however, various avenues look possible.

In short, the ECOs should offer some help to some people, but are far from bridging the yawning gap between what the Green Deal can achieve (rather little, see previous article on the Green Deal) and the 80-odd-% cut in energy consumption/emissions that we desperately need to achieve. I suggest that as energy efficiency benefits building occupants, public services (notably health & education), the benefits bill, energy security and the cost of energy, and the balance of payments,  then perhaps all these benefiting entities and sectors should be contributing in a co-ordinated way.

View/download The Green Deal and the ECO (pdf – version without illustrations)

And here you can download a pdf of Green Deal and the ECO as it appeared in the magazine, complete with illustrations.

Can Passivhaus teach the policymakers to love the occupant?

Ventilation was much in my mind as I dipped in and out of conversations and seminars at Ecobuild this week. And I began to notice a disturbing tendency for airtightness measures and ventilation to be discussed quite separately, with the costs and benefits of each addressed almost as though the two were unrelated.

Again and again, ventilation appeared to be an afterthought, or a problem, instead of an integral part of the assessment of building performance. Several people also lamented that  “well, you can get draft proofing done on a Green Deal, but ventilation doesn’t meet the golden rule, so who will pay for it? – it can’t be funded”. And alarmingly, this dangerous split seems to be reflected in the very structure of the Green Deal.[1]

This strikes me as rather like saying “you can get this operation that you need, but there is no money to sew you up afterwards”.

Ventilation seemed almost to be resented, an ‘obstacle’ in the way of deeper carbon cuts, limiting what could be achieved. All that fresh air spoils the building performance, it seems.

This put me in mind of a similar flavour you find in discussions about ‘comfort taking’. Once again, the pesky needs of the occupants are getting in the way of the true goal of carbon cutting. Thus in its Green Deal Impact Assessment  DECC complained that “comfort taking” leads to “underachievement in real-world energy savings”.[2] Is it really an “underachievement” to make someone’s house more comfortable?

In both these instances, there is a not-so-hidden subtext that the base animal needs of building occupants are a real hindrance to the low-energy, zero carbon perfection we are seeking. And in a way, you can see how if your job is to achieve these goals, a building with no occupiers would solve a lot of your problems.

So it might be unexpected in a way, that it takes Passivhaus, possibly the most shamelessly geeky and science-based standard of them all, to be the one that not only embraces the occupant, but actually starts from the occupant perspective. My understanding of Passivhaus design is it is built from the premise that occupants want comfortable, healthy buildings that are cheap to run. And yet, somehow, it looks as though Passivhaus manages to deliver the lowest energy and (I think you could easily argue) lowest emissions buildings of the lot of them.

Which is why (or at least one of the reasons why), as I remarked on Twitter this morning, I found that Passivhaus crept into my mind quite often, when I was pondering my uneasiness with what was being said outside the Passivhaus sessions. I think the Passivhaus lot are on to something.



[1]  I was told that for post 1919 buildings there is not anything in the Green Deal that requires the advisors to assess ventilation, even when they recommend draftproofing. There are especially serious concerns about the mass-scale installation of solid wall insulation, where the installer alone is responsible for the ventilation strategy, with no back-stop liability resting with a Green Deal provider. This is an issue that needs more than a blog to tackle – hopefully I will get the chance to come back to this soon.

[2] DECC June 2012 Green Deal Impact Assessment

Institute for European Environmental Policy report challenges “misleading” biomass GHG accounting

The Institute for European Environmental Policy (IEEP) has reviewed current thinking about the life cycle analysis conventions for bioenergy (and woody biomass in particular) and found that the routinely used metrics are “increasingly recognised as flawed”.  “This applies particularly to commonly used approaches to life cycle analysis that presume carbon neutrality of the bioenergy feedstock,” the Institute says.

Without a better system for evaluating the greenhouse gas impacts of our policies, they conclude, we cannot know if (or when) our bioenergy use might actually cut greenhouse gas emissions. Continue reading “Institute for European Environmental Policy report challenges “misleading” biomass GHG accounting”