Downsizers’ Passivhaus marries natural materials with high renewable tech

This light and airy Passivhaus was built by a retired couple who wanted to downsize from their awkward older home, to one that would be eco-friendly, comfortable, and work well whatever their future needs.

The successful result is an attractive, warm, modern-looking house. The structure is timber frame with wood-based insulation; the roof meanwhile is basically all PVs, and a heat pump and battery complete the comprehensive renewable set-up, minimising the need to import – and pay for – any grid energy.

Read the article I wrote for Passive House Plus magazine here.

Archive keeps its cool the Passivhaus way

Hereford archive chooses passive preservation

Safeguarding historic documents and other artefacts requires super-stable environmental conditions. This has usually been achieved by using masses of expensive and energy-hogging heating and cooling plant, but a new approach for Herefordshire Council used the passive house approach to conserve energy, money — and the county’s precious historical archives. Nov 2015

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Passive school learning refines the design

Building a better passive school

The team behind a series of passive house schools in Wolverhampton have used the lessons learned from in-depth monitoring of the first two buildings to make the third even better — and cheaper to build. Oct 2015

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Electric Heating – time to come in from the cold?

While there are well-established technologies to produce electricity without fossil fuels, decarbonisation of heat is struggling to get under way. Recommended strategies include expansion of low carbon networked heat and possibly the decarbonisation of gas – though these are still only happening at a scale (and with dubious carbon credentials, see PH+ Iss 15 – district heating). However, the commonest proposed means for decarbonising heat is via electrification.

Electrification of heat raises a number of questions about the ability of our power systems to produce enough low carbon electricity and their capacity to transmit it. But it also represents something of a u-turn in building services design. Continue reading “Electric Heating – time to come in from the cold?”

District Heating – does it work with Passivhaus?

Cost effective district heating schemes need a nice dense energy demand. They also involve a lot of circulating hot water, which with the best will in the world, is going to involve continuous heat loss. Highly-insulated low energy buildings need very little heat – and in the summer, heat gains can be a positive menace.

So can the two work together? I explored the question a bit in this article for Passive House Plus – downloadable here as a pdf.

District Heating – does it work in Passivhaus?

Deep retrofit – the big prize?

Simple home energy efficiency improvements (such as new boilers, cavity wall insulation etc) can bring valuable comfort and health benefits to the occupants of inefficient homes – especially those in fuel poverty – as the last article revealed (see here). However, energy, carbon and bill savings tend to be modest, rarely topping 15% or 20% – and sometimes energy use actually increases!

If housing is to contribute its share of the 80% cuts in carbon emissions this country is committed to, in order to play is part in tackling climate change, retrofits will need to go deeper – a lot deeper. But will occupants benefit from the extra work? And is it affordable? Continue reading “Deep retrofit – the big prize?”

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?”

Allowable Solutions Consultation – silly policy, but still worth responding

Plenty of scorn has been poured on the way that the zero carbon homes target has been watered down, then watered down again, as if it were a homoeopathic remedy for climate change.

Others, notably Nick Grant and Doug King, have led the charge against the very concept of zero carbon buildings as being an illogical concept that diverts construction from what it could be doing best — and I cheerfully count myself among their followers.

However, on the particular point of the current government consultation on the Allowable Solutions element of “Zero Carbon Homes”, I do think it is worth engaging – as there is an opportunity to make the arguments that high fabric standards should be at the heart of the zero carbon policy. Who can say how long the Zero Carbon Homes policy will last? – however, the better the fabric standards we have at the core of it, the better placed we’ll be to replace it with something more sensible.

I have had a look at parts of what DCLG is consulting on, and describe and comment on what I found, in the article below.

Download Article on Allowable Solutions Consultation October 2013 (pdf)

The article also contains the links to the DCLG consultation documents.

STOP PRESS! Doug King has shared his response to this consultation, making the case very thoroughly that “offsetting” energy use and carbon emissions from housing, by reducing energy use and emissions in other sectors, is a nonsense. Those other sectors should be making those cuts anyway – all selling them off as “allowable solutions” does is to pick off the low-hanging fruit from another sector, making it more expensive for them to do what they need to do. The net effect would probably be to reduce energy use an emisissons LESS than you would if proper energy and carbon standards were applied to housebuilding in the first place.

Read his response here:

http://www.dougking.co.uk/allowable-solutions-response/

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.