Yet again, sorry for the hiatus in publishing. There seems to have been an awful lot going on here, mostly training, mostly about waste. This is great. Waste is one of our biggest issues as a society. It costs a lot of money to waste as much as we do.
But, what I want to write about today, whilst related to waste, comes at it from a different angle. I want to look at carbon in construction and, in particular, the influence the government’s proposed Green Deal might have to help both the construction industry and society’s need to transition to a lower carbon economy.
This is not new stuff, but I have been presenting at the EcoShowcase events for the last couple of weeks instead of Alison, and had to read up about them. Having done that I thought I’d take the opportunity to blog about them before they leak out of my brain again.
First of all a brief reiteration. Climate change is happening and we all contribute to it in our daily activities. At the same time, fossil fuel is depleting. There is only so much oil, natural gas and coal in the world and we’ve used the easy to extract stuff already. The rest of it is in deep water (Deep Water Horizon wasn’t drilling at the very edge of technical expertise for fun), countries that don’t like us much (and need their resources for their own burgeoning populations) or accessible only using hugely polluting and/or dangerous methods (gas fracking, tar sands etc). The UK, having been energy self-sufficient for years, now has to import gas. Over 40%. That’s a big fall from maximum production as recently as 2004.
So we have two predicaments. We are contributing to climate change and we consider our right to pollute non-negotiable. We are moving into an era where energy will be costly and prices will be increasingly volatile. The strategy the government seems to be pursuing is to try to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, which should also cut our emissions of greenhouse gases. This does not seem to be a wholehearted policy or to be terribly effective at the moment but it’s better than nothing.*
On the positive side there are a lot of competent people working on the Government’s behalf. They keep coming up with great ideas. A lot of these focus on the construction industry. Why?
Construction, as the government’s Innovation & Growth Team (IGT) point out, is a large and complex industry, ranging from huge construction groups undertaking design and highly technical operations to more than a million individual tradesmen working alone. Together the industry contributes around 9% to UK GDP and employs 2.6 million people. More importantly it influenced almost half of our total carbon dioxide equivalents in 2007 and around 10% of our national energy consumption is used in the production and transport of construction products.
Two major strategies that have been influential in promoting sustainable construction are the 2008 Strategy for Sustainable Construction and The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, produced in 2009 by the last government. Paul Morrell of the IGT comments that, ‘Over the next 40 years the Low Carbon Transition Plan is virtually a business plan for the construction industry’. It’s an opportunity, just as long as the industry looks at it that way and doesn’t lobby (again) to have the requirements watered down.
The IGT, on the behalf of the government, looked at the readiness of the construction industry to deliver a low carbon future and produced their final report last year. There are three overarching actions identified:
- Decarbonise the business throughout the supply chain
- Provide new and refurbished buildings allowing energy efficiency
- Provide infrastructure to enable the supply of clean energy
They also identified a number of barriers:
- Information overload
- Industry structure
- The need for up-skilling
- The gap between the design spec and the actual performance of buildings
- The continued focus on initial capital costs rather than lower operational costs
- The need for workable methodologies for carbon accounting**
- Providing drivers to increase customer demand
- A need to address the current old and draughty building stock
The report is fascinating (and long) and is well worth a look, if only at the excellent Executive Summary.
So one of the clever ideas that has emerged is the government’s Green Deal. Work on energy efficiency for new builds is pretty much covered by increasingly tight Building Regulations, planning and, often, funding requirements through Code for Sustainable Homes and BREEAM, but in the UK we have large quantities of older properties. How do we encourage homeowners, landlords and business owners to improve their properties? Given that no-one has huge quantities of available cash at the moment, the upfront costs can constitute a major barrier together with long payback periods. The government has also identified lack of awareness, information overload and lack of confidence in information and a fear of being taken for a ride. There is an abiding fear of small contractors who will ride into town, bodge a job and disappear without trace.
The Green Deal, which is only available in proposal form at the moment, will be designed to deal with this. It is defined as ‘a framework to enable private firms to offer consumers energy efficiency improvements to their homes …and businesses at no up-front cost and recoup payments through a charge in instalments on the energy bill.’
The Deal is based on eight key principles. The first is the Golden Rule; the expected financial savings must be equal to or greater than the costs attached to the energy bill – i.e. it has to be at least financially neutral to the consumer. Then, the measures must be approved, advisors and installers must both be accredited, the provider must give appropriate advice within the terms of the consumer credit act and take account of the individual circumstances of the applicant, and the consent of all parties, particularly the bill payer, must be obtained. The debt generated by the work stays with the property so that the person benefiting from the work, if the property changes hands, is the person who pays the instalments but this must be disclosed to the new owner/leaser. Finally there will be a requirement to protect vulnerable consumers.
Further work will be needed before this idea is put into practice and potential shortcomings addressed. For example, those living in energy poverty at the moment are unlikely to be able to benefit from the clever funding method. Also, those (like me and one in four homes) living in properties with solid walls are unlikely to be able to pay off the high insulation costs (up to £15,000) using savings from their energy bills. Other options through new Energy Company Obligations are being considered.
The first Green Deals should hit the market in autumn 2012, all being well. That’s great although we might want to speed that along a bit. Just before presenting this at Reading I Googled the current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You may know that the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was based on the assumption that at 450 parts per million (ppm) we’d probably be uncomfortable but alright. James Hansen of NASA has since presented the opinion that 350ppm is the maximum that we should allow without long-term detrimental effects. The historical level, before the industrial revolution, seems to have been 280ppm. I was really shocked to see that the figure for May 2011 was 394.35ppm. I’ve since come across an article in the Guardian about this but it was in the environment section. Surely this sort of thing should be front page news.
*One of the major problems the gvt have with tackling climate change and resource depletion is that the economic model they (we all) use requires growth to provide us with prosperity. This means that the treasury and the environmental sections of the government are psychotically permanently at odds. They need to see a psychiatrist or, at the very least, a marriage guidance counsellor. And this is even before we look at the other issues embedded in the very idea of coalition.
** There is a consultation out at present looking at how to best report carbon for UK businesses. It can be found on the Defra pages here.
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