CONFERENCE ECOBUILD
Costs an obstacle to zero carbon new homes
● The Communities Minister admits that the policy still needs to be delivered
In a session titled ‘The road to zero carbon’, the Communities Minister, Andrew Stunell, spoke frankly about the challenges facing both government and industry. He said the idea of zero carbon homes still had to be delivered in practice, and this involved a range of people – from developers to designers to users. But he stressed that costs for low carbon homes were coming down, with developer Barratts ‘looking to deliver Code 4 housing without extra cost’. However, Stunell also lambasted the industry for failing to produce low carbon homes that, in practice, performed well. He said that tests on such homes had shown them to be performing below their low carbon specifi cation, which meant that delivery was not matching expectation.
Stunell threw down the gauntlet to the industry by declaring: ‘I want to see the highest standards for sustainability.’ Professor Malcolm Bell of Leeds
Metropolitan University, which has carried out tests on heat loss from low carbon new homes, outlined ways in which their ‘performance gap’ could be bridged.
This involved ‘three pillars of performance’.
The fi rst, ‘tolerance-based design’, was aimed at ‘knowing just how close we can get’ to achieving performance.
The second, ‘process control’, meant ‘constructing technology so that it performs’. The third pillar was ‘performance measurement and feedback’. ‘Without feedback we’ll never learn how to do it,’ stressed Bell.
One leading developer mentioned by Stunell, Barratts, was represented by its chief executive, Mark Clare. Clare insisted that housebuilders were now focusing on making the fabric of new homes ‘as effi cient as possible’ – known as the ‘fabric fi rst’ approach to construction.
Builders were also exploring new technologies, he said, adding: ‘We have to ensure they can actually be used’. However, echoing Stunell, he said the real challenge was the cost of low carbon
homes, which is ‘still too high’. He called for a ‘transformation’ in renewables to make them far less costly, and said the government needed to ensure there was ‘clarity of targets’ for implementing policy on zero carbon homes.
Andrew Stunell: Frank discussion
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CIBSE Half Page Horizontal May 2012 VS
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May 2012 CIBSE Journal
18/04/2012 15:04 13
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