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energy standards for buildings jacked up in SA

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) will soon be releasing SANS 204 to set new standards for energy efficiency in buildings. If implemented following the public comment period, this should raise the bar for reduced energy consumption from air conditioning and heating. It's not clear how this would be implemented, given the shortage of energy auditors, but SANS 204 and the forthcoming release of the Green Star building rating system by the Green Building Council of South Africa should create greater impetus for the establishment of an industry of consultants and contractors who understand energy efficiency.

UK standards heading for zero carbon houses

The first zero carbon house built in the UK by a volume housebuilder was unveiled earlier this month. It has achieved a design rating of six stars (the highest level available) under the Code for Sustainable Homes, which stipulates that all UK homes built from 2016 must be zero-carbon. From this month, all new houses must have a rating against the code, which replaced the Ecohomes rating system for the assessment of new homes in England. Building standards will be made progressively tougher, leading up to the zero-carbon target date. The UK Green Building Council has defined when a house can be called zero carbon. The proposal is "that a zero-carbon house must produce almost all its energy on-site or very nearby in, say, a communal heat and power system". House builders have argued that this is too stringent and that off-site renewable power generation should be accepted.

the future is light

It's still a real challenge to find product suppliers who understand what products are suitable for solar energy. There's lots of general information on the internet, but what I need is local knowledge of what is available right here, in my city. I've been combing the local shops for LED lights. There are lots of LED downlighters, but even at Eagle Electric, one of Cape Town's biggest lighting suppliers, the shop assistants are clueless about how much light you get per watt of electricity consumed. I need to understand how many LED lights are needed for general lighting or for specific tasks, to replace traditional incandescent or new CFL lights, and this depends on the particular product. Not all LED lights are created equal.

So this morning I had an 'aha' moment when I read in the Cape Times 'Techno Times' supplement about LEDlighting, a Cape Town company that designs commercial LED installations and gives advice on energy-efficient lighting. If you need LEDs, Pierre van Helden is your man. The company doesn't have a retail outlet, but if you want to transform your house to reduce your carbon footprint, give him a call.

In the TechnoTimes reproduction of a Popular Mechanics article, Pierre suggests that LEDs will change the way we see lighting. Instead of an easy-to-replace central bulb in every room of the house, distributed lighting will become the norm, with fixtures embedded into furniture or other elements of the room. Since they can last up to 20 years, LEDs don't need to be easily accessible. Design options are more flexible, and clever design is more important for energy efficiency. We don't need uniformly bright light, but rather a lower level of ambient light with additional task-specific areas of light.

give a damn

There are a few homeless people in the world, but not nearly as many as some people would have us believe.

There are billions of inadequately housed, under-resourced, oppressed, crime-ridden, malnourished and disease-afflicted people. But that is not the same as being homeless. I draw the (perhaps obvious) distinction because governments responsible for the welfare of large numbers of housing-challenged people have a tendency to set themselves housing targets so that they can claim political points for providing homes for the homeless. It's time to change the paradigm; time to take the focus off the house and put it onto the services needed to support the community.

I am not for a moment suggesting that a tin-and-cardboard shack is preferable to a more robust dwelling, but given the inability of government agencies (in South Africa, at least) to deliver houses on a scale that eliminates informal shacks and in a way that keeps communities intact, I have to wonder why there isn't official recognition that conditions in squatter settlements need to be improved.

tech, tech and more tech

Another attempt at predicting what features might be in the house of the future. Am I the only one who wonders why the future is always portrayed as "current trends, amplified"? I have seen pictures from old magazines envisioning cities of the future with skyscrapers that dedicated most of their space to allowing cars to drive to the top, to meet airplanes landing on the roof. The dreamers were enthralled at the prospect of moving up to previously unimagined heights, but failed to consider that cars were not the way to get there. If there is one thing forecasters have been notoriously bad at, it's anticipating how new technologies will be used - invariably there are unintended behaviours and designs that result.

Still, one thing that most certainly will be needed in houses in the very near future is improved monitoring of resource consumption. Today's carbon calculators are too simplified and generic to be much use in tracking attainment of personal, municipal and national targets. We need to be far more aware of the impacts of individual day-to-day decisions.

One of the ideas expressed at the Green Building Retrofitting Seminar on 10 April was "sweat the small stuff". We can't rely only on grand plans to manage resources more responsibly. Colin Devenish from the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town pointed out that if toilets were modified to reduce water consumption by only one litre per flush, the Waterfront would save 23 million litres a year. But we can't manage what we don't measure.

retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency

Yesterday I joined the Cape Town portion of the Green Building video-linked seminar on retrofitting of buildings for energy efficiency. Presentations in Cape Town, Pretoria and Durban covered a range of topics from detailed case studies of building performance improvements to city-wide approaches to sustainability - all with the aim of spreading knowledge and discussing strategies to accelerate the retrofitting of buildings across South Africa's cities.

A strategy to address both the short-term electricity supply crisis and the long-term environmnental and resource issues cannot ignore the need to improve the performance of buildings. Llewellyn van Wyk cited CSIR research in 2004 showing that there were 11.2 million dwelling units in the country, and 70.6 million sq m of non-residential building space. In Pretoria, cooling and lighting alone are responsible for 75% of energy use in office buildings. John Less of the Clinton Climate Initiative noted that buildings in the US are responsible for 71% of the country's total electricity consumption, and 33% of emissions.

Retrofitting to reduce this consumption is a key challenge. Municipal and provincial governments in South Africa are starting to consider their own building stock - the City of Johannesburg (one of the C40 cities) is advertising today for tenders to retrofit the city's entire stock of Council-owned buildings.

Colin Devenish, formerly of Old Mutual Investment Group and now with the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town, pointed out that a few building tenants in South Africa are starting to show signs of demanding better energy performance, and some landlords have discovered the financial benefits of improving efficiencies, although landlord / tenant relationships and building management systems in many cases work against change. But municipalities are actively looking at new by-laws to address these issues, and developers will have to smarten up quickly.

Eskom's immediate crisis is the driving force now, but the response of the building industry needs to look beyond the short term. There is the carbon market, which can be seen as a boon or a bane, depending on your perspective, but there is another driving force of change that is already presenting a serious threat: urbanisation. The global population is growing at around 73 million people a year, and an increasing percentage of the population is urbanised. Cities around the world are falling behind in the provision of infrastructure to meet urban needs. This is not a third world problem alone, because it is not only third world cities that are developing unsustainably. But in developing countries, according to van Wyk, this pressure - and inadequate response - is already causing ecological and social collapse (more severe in some areas than others), and committed leadership is demanded.

Buildings are only part of the problem, so retrofitting existing stock and changing design practice for new buildings are only partial solutions to more widespread concerns; but good building design, management and operation are vital to improving the liveability of cities. Case studies have demonstrated their potential contribution not only to reducing carbon impacts, but also to reshaping the social and cultural landscape. And social norms, along with awareness and education, are vital to instilling a sense of responsibility in the general population. Without these key ingredients, we are dead in the water.

think globally, bake locally

It's got skylights, natural ventilation, a grey water system, a car that runs on biodiesel... and it's a gingerbread house. That's right, the folks at bakeforachange held a competition to see who could come up with the most sustainable gingerbread house design. It's too late to enter, but you can view the results on Flickr. [via SCQ]

proof that buildings can be a delight

I am not sure that this building at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore would score well under an environmental performance rating system, but for a large-scale modern building, the green roof is stunning.

And speaking of building performance, a new report published by the Commission for Environmental Co-operation (CEC) says it is possible for the most efficient buildings to consume 70% less energy than conventional properties. And since almost three quarters of the buildings that will be standing in 2050 have already been built, we'd better get on with changing the way new ones are designed, and retrofitting existing building stock.

"Improving our built environment is probably the single greatest opportunity to protect and enhance the natural environment," said CEC executive director Adrian Vazquez. [...] "Green building represents some of the ripest 'low-hanging fruit' for achieving significant reductions in climate change emissions."

But apart from a few (very few) property developers who see a market for green buildings, there is very little incentive to improve energy efficiency and reduce resource consumption and emissions: only 0.5% of homes in the US and Canada could be considered "green".

"At the moment, there is no real reason for the private sector to change its practice from a purely financial standpoint," explained Jonathan Westeinde, chairman of the CEC advisory group.

"Generally, because of the leasing and financing structures, there is a split incentive between the owner or developer who is making the financial investments, and the tenant or occupier who will benefit. I think this is where the biggest hurdle remains."

house of hemp

You can smoke it, you can wear it, you can make oil and cosmetic products from it, and many people swear by its medicinal properties. South Africa's own House of Hemp sells it in just about any (legal) form you can imagine. (Their first retail outlet was opened in Johannesburg in 2001.) But dude, this stuff is way cool for another reason.

The House of Hemp and the CSIR have been working with the South African Department of Trade and Industry in setting up pilot projects for hemp production in the Eastern Cape. Cannabis has been a huge industry there for decades, but of course it's illegal, and I understand the Department of Health hasn't approved anything other than pilot farms under "drug testing licence", despite DTI involvement. If this is true, a big opportunity is being missed - and this is not just about legalising rural jobs: it's also about climate change.

role of cement in carbon emissions

The cement industry is responsible for 5% of all carbon dioxide released globally as a result of human activities, according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. In each country, the volume of emissions depends on the sources of electricity, since a large portion of emissions is related to the power used in cement manufacture. In South Africa, where most electricity comes from coal-fired plants, each ton of cement produced releases 750kg of carbon dioxide. Last year, the country consumed 14.1 million tons of cement, 89% of which was produced locally.

In response to the South African government's support of emissions targets for developing countries, the local cement industry, represented by ACMP, has warned that carbon emissions caps would lead to higher volumes of imports. The assumption is that growth in cement use (forecast to be 24 million tons a year by 2014) is the only way to feed economic growth.

There are two flaws to this argument.

First, caps would not be imposed without the option to trade carbon credits, so if the industry does grow, cement will simply become more expensive as a result of internalising the cost of carbon emissions. And since the UN negotiations that are expected to lead to a renogotiated climate change treaty by next year will include limits and trading for many more countries than at present, cement prices will increase everywhere and imports won't necessarily be cheaper than the local product.

Second, there are perfectly viable alternatives to cement in the construction industry. Cement quantities in concrete can be reduced by substituting with flyash, for instance. (And flyash is a readily available by-product of coal-fired electricity production.) The building industry could also put much more effort into designing buildings to use less concrete.

There needs to be greater awareness of the options and of the carbon implications of design decisions, then we can begin to decouple economic growth from emissions growth.

Once the Green Building Council of South Africa starts using a local version of Green Star - the Australian system for rating the sustainability performance of buildings - choices will be much smarter in terms of energy efficiency overall. The next step will be to establish building codes that address carbon intensity explicitly, as is already happening in the UK.

For more information on the cap-and-trade concept, and variations on the theme, have a look at this recent WorldChanging article.