22 THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE Building ‘beyond zero’


Rob East of Newland Homes, explains how the Gloucestershire housebuilder took a “conviction-based” decision to redefi ne its design approach beyond the norm to provide climate-resilient, and even carbon-negative homes.


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t was our development director, eremy Drew, who fi rst raised the issue of our strategy for climate change. He, along with other senior members of the team, challenged us to question what more could we do as a business to cut our reliance on fossil fuels. It wasn’t driven by regulation, but by conviction. If we were serious about building for the future, we had to be bolder and more ambitious. Consequently, we installed air source heat pumps at our next development and planned to double our solar provision. The SAP assessor calculated the design would achieve an 85% carbon reduction – a brilliant result, well above the Building Regulation threshold. However, we felt we could do better, and we asked ourselves a blunt question: why settle for compliance when we could aim for zero carbon? Through extensive discussions with our SAP assessor and after making further investigations, we committed to more than double our solar provision: enough to create homes that generate more energy than they consume. In other words, homes that deliver zero carbon in primary energy use.


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That exchange set us on a journey that has redefi ned how Newland Homes designs and builds our homes. Today, we continue to push forward, leading the industry, certainly in our region, among both SMEs and plcs.


GOING BEYOND COMPLIANCE We chose SAP as our benchmark as it’s widely recognised and government approved. Although it’s not  awless (no model is), it underpins Energy erformance Certifi cates (ECs), which the public are familiar with, and crucially, it gives us a metric that is both calculable and comparable across developments. This metric has allowed us to evidence that our homes exceed the anticipated Future Homes Standard (widely expected to be a 75-80% reduction on 2013 regulations) and that zero carbon homes are not a theoretical ambition to be phased in – they are achievable here and now. We are building the homes of tomorrow, today.


It’s a simple approach, in principle:


• Build fabric fi rst, with a lot more insulation and airtight construction


to minimise heat demand. The insulation in our  oors and roofs is almost at Passivehaus level, which minimises heat demand (approx 27-31% carbon reduction)


• Use air source heat pumps, which deliver 3.5 to four times the energy they consume (equating to a further 55-62% carbon reduction)


• Top up the shortfall with renewable energy, primarily photovoltaics


The outcome is EPCs that show negative CO2


emissions and energy rating scores circa 100, the top possible score.


LEANING INTO THE COMPLEXITY Let’s be clear, switching from installing gas boilers as standard practice to air source heat pumps hasn’t been easy. We’ve had to bring in M&E consultants to manage the interplay between trades and we’ve leaned heavily on manufacturer training to upskill our teams. However, the effort has paid off. Five years in, we have real-world experience of designing, building and living in zero carbon homes, using renewable


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