Buildings face carbon clean-up

The Sunday Times
May 3, 2009

Homes and offices consume 40% of global energy and emit the same proportion of pollution
Danny Fortson

The internal combustion engine. The jumbo jet. The desktop computer. In the fight against climate change, they have all been targeted by lawmakers and eco-warriors alike.
Yet the biggest baddies of them all, buildings, have so far slipped under the radar. That could be about to change. According to research from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), the world’s houses and office buildings consume 40% of global energy and emit the same proportion of gases, making them the single biggest source of pollution in the world. Transport, at 30%, is the next biggest culprit.
Yet unlike the motor sector, where stringent regulations dictate what comes out of the exhaust pipe, no similar system exists for buildings.
“Nobody realises this, but buildings have exhaust,” said John Curtis of the environmental consultancy ERM. That exhaust is why London, for example, is on average 2C warmer than the surrounding region.
As governments sign up to binding carbon-reduction targets, a growing number of companies and lawmakers are calling for a mandatory code to be placed on buildings.
George David, chairman of United Technologies, the American conglomerate that makes everything from lifts to air conditioners, said a more heavy-handed approach is needed to address “the largest single sink for energy on the planet”.
He said: “For 100 years we have had a life-safety code and structural codes for buildings because we value human life.
The same rationale should be applied to a building energy-efficiency code.”
According to the WBCSD study, a $400 billion (£268 billion) annual investment in building efficiency would lead to a 60% cut in building emissions globally by 2050. The savings achieved would mean a 5% to 10% annual return on that investment, the study found.
The most often talked about tactic is “sealing the envelope”. Heating and air conditioning accounts for more power consumption, about 40%, than anything else in a building. This is because much of the hot or cool air leaks out of poorly-sealed nooks and crannies. Proper insulation and exterior cladding means climate-control systems need to work less hard. “Leaking is the single-biggest problem so sealing the envelope is job one,” said Curtis.
At the other end of the spectrum, new buildings can be fitted with systems that use much less power than traditional boilers and chillers. Heat pumps, for example, are a big improvement on typical boilers. They act like a refrigerator in reverse – taking cool air and converting it into warmer air to heat a building – and use a fifth of the energy that a traditional boiler consumes.
The shape of the building is also important. The thinner it is, the more natural light reaches the interior space and the greater the air circulation, cutting heating and cooling bills. Amanda Sturgeon, senior partner at Perkins+Will, the architecture firm, said: “We’re starting to see a move away from the blocky, rectangular blobs toward thinner buildings. The ability to cross-ventilate is greater and you need less electric light,” she said.
Water use is also a concern. Low-flow toilets and even waterless urinals are becoming more common. Cardiff City football club, for example, has fitted its new £50m stadium with a handful of waterless urinals to see how they stand up to the rigours of a match day. They work with a special chemical that sits in the trough and acts like a natural seal, allowing the waste to pass through but trapping the odour. According to Armitage Shanks, one urinal can save up to 87,000 litres of water a year, the annual consumption of two people.
Much of the technology is available today, but policymakers and industry remain fascinated with more exotic solutions, like ringing the country with giant offshore wind turbines or burying power-plant emissions underground. The risk is that by focusing on the more eye-catching ideas we will miss larger opportunity.
David said: “The key is that most of this stuff is available now. It’s not decades away like fuel cells for cars. We can do so much of this today.”
Big gains can be made for little outlay
MAKING new buildings lean and green is a technical challenge, though fairly straightforward compared with rehabilitating our existing homes, office blocks and factories.
“Getting new construction right just slows the rate at which things are getting worse. We need to make what we already have better,” said Chris Jofeh, leader of the existing buildings consultancy at Arup, the engineering firm.
He and his colleagues are part of a new wave of businesses springing up to address the problems presented by making older properties – usually designed and built without any particular thought for energy use – more environmentally friendly.
Only 1% or 2% of a city is newly built each year, so most of our present buildings will be around for decades to come. The drive to clean them up has been given added impetus by a series of government requirements that are tightening the screw on landlords and homeowners. All buildings must now have an Energy Performance Certificate when sold, and in some cases when relet or modified. The introduction of the Carbon Reduction Commitment and the possible penalties on poorly-performing companies has made the investment by landlords financially more attractive.
There are other perks for property owners. A recent survey of large corporate tenants found that many would be prepared to pay a premium rent for a green property.
Landlords wanting to improve their estates should tread carefully, however. The first challenge, says Jofeh, is to assess what is the right thing to do for the business.
“We often have people coming to us with a preconceived idea that they will get some kind of green ‘bling’ – a piece of kit or new technology that will generate power – and think that is the solution. We try to get them to go back to first principles and ask what is the real question they are asking, and how that relates to the performance of their business.”
The first step in tackling an existing building is to track its present performance. The Building Research Establishment, a certification and consultancy body that publishes widely used codes and guidelines for construction, issued an assessment plan for building managers in February. It tracks a building’s energy use, and maps out ways of improving it. Alan Yates, technical director for sustainability at BRE Global, says dramatic improvements can be achieved from better building management.
“It might not be as visible as having a wind turbine outside your office to show how green you are, but it will probably be more cost-effective and more significant. There are examples of 50% to 60% savings,” he said.
“You get the first 20% for free,” said Jofeh. “Managing what you do better, and simply turning equipment off when it is not needed, can give you big gains.”
If landlords decide to invest in improving the building, better insulation normally provides the greatest gain. Lighting is also fairly straightforward. The Hammerson property group recently replaced 20,000 lightbulbs in the car parks at its various buildings with new fluorescent bulbs. The result was a 35% decrease in energy bills at those locations.
The other issue is education. For the past couple of years Hammerson has run an information campaign for its tenants. Paul Edwards, head of sustainability at Hammerson, said: “If you invest in energy efficiency, people seem to think it means you need to wear a hairshirt, when it’s really about cutting costs. We can’t insist that they change their lights, but we can provide them with the knowledge.”
Even the greenest building is only as efficient as those who use it. Peter Braithwaite, head of sustainability at CH2M Hill, the consultancy, said: “Most buildings run at 70% to 80% of design efficiency. When the tenants change, so does the energy profile.”