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I've been putting off writing this post for some days, given how ear-bleedingly complicating the issue is. It's carbon intensity and I attended a debate on the issue, orgainised by the UK Green Building Council and Building Services Journal, last Tuesday morning. As far as I understand it the nub of the problem is this - is the current way of measuring the carbon make-up of grid electricity correct?
Everyone is agreed that this is a pretty crucial problem. If the answer is in the negative then all the projections being made by building services engineers about how much savings can be made by on-site generation of power will be about as valuable as an American sub-prime mortgage.
The debate was kicked off in the pages of BSJ back in May when Arup associate director James Thonger challenged many of the projected savings being put forward for renewable technologies such as CHP and trigeneration by bodies such as the London Climate Change Agency (LCCA). His thesis was that renewable proponents were comparing apples with pears, ie comparing the carbon intensity of CHP with that of grid electricity from coal fired power stations, which is the most carbon heavy of sources but only makes up a fraction of the energy created for the grid. So the results are skewed too heavily towards the newer whizzy technologies, when the actual savings against the average carbon content of grid power is minimal, reckons Thonger. Are you keeping up at the back?
Thonger is calling for the Government to appoint an energy auditor to independently verify claims on carbon saving made by technology providers or authorities. In May's BSJ he wrote: "In order to reduce fossil fuel consumption, it is essential that the UK uses fossil fuel-specific energy efficiency benchmarks. Failure to adopt a more scientifically rigorous carbon-saving analysis will mean that we will continue to deceive ourselves that we are reducing fossil fuel consumption while doing exactly the opposite."
This provoked a response by Allan Jones, chief executive of the LCCA in the July edition of BSJ and there was a further news piece in this month's edition on new carbon conversion figures released by DEFRA.
So all good preparation for a lively debate last week. I arrived somewhat late so missed the introduction from UKGBC chief executive Paul King and the first part of a presentation from Roger Hitchin from the BRE. He seemed to be indicating just what a tricky task it is to work out how much carbon comes via the grid, given that it comes from different sources (bot types of power stations and from different countries, especially on the Continent). he added that to add to the complexity one would want to factor in the lifespan of a building, say 50 years, into the equation.
Hitchin was followed by Professor David Fisk of Imperial College, who is co-director of BP's Urban Energy System project. He stressed that all such figures on intensity are pretty much guestimates and will be made even more confused by all the new different sources of energy that are emerging. "The LCCA accept that their prescriptions on energy policy.. are fuzzy," he said. And Fisk came up with an ingenious analogy when summing up the problem. "It's the same problem Karl Marx stumbled upon when he came up with his labour theory of value," he said. "He tried to work out how many man hours it would take to make a piece of steel." This, Fisk explained, was all very well is men just worked out on one product for an allotted amount of time, but fell down when the issue of multi-tasking came into play. Same for energy if you are producing two different energy sources during at the same time, such as oil and hydrogen, according to Fisk.
Fisk widened the argument to take the industry to task for a failure in understanding how the products it makes actually perform. "My j'accuse to the industry is if you are going to argue about this (energy intensity) and you don't know how your own buildings perform, that's a problem. If you spent more time working out how they work then you might actually meet the target."
The debate was opened up and in stepped William Orchard of Orchard Partners (no website but he wrote an interesting letter to Nicholas Stern back in 2005) who made an impassioned plea for engineers to be more proactive on the issue. "Engineers should be doing it themselves," he said. "We don't need to rely on DEFRA or the DTI. We are the engineers, we are the people who should be modelling it. We should be telling the Government what to do."
A parallel point was made by Chris Twinn from Arup, who like Fisk suggested the industry had a more significant fundamental problem to deal with. "By adding new stock we are adding to capacity. We are adding to the demand (on the grid) not reducing it."
"By adding new stock we are adding to capacity. We are adding to the demand (on the grid) not reducing it."
Absolutely - the imperative is to improve existing housing stock, and move the emphasis away from new-build low or zero carbon homes.
The Govt position on the Merton rule is 'unfortunate' in this regard, hobbling councils' only effective power to get private housing stock improved.
If we could persuade adult children to stay living at home until (say) 30, we could cut the demand for new housing and reduce energy use and emissions.
Maybe the Govt could be persuaded to introduce an "Offspring Obligations scheme". In outline - you keep your kids at home until 30, and in return you get tax or carbon credits funded by those parents who have let their kids go out and buy their own place...The computer systems to run this would only take a decade or so to de-bug.
I'm sure the carbon savings would exceed those from replacing all the UK's incandescent light bulbs (about 1% of the UK total isn't it?)
Posted by: Robert Palgrave | 21 August 2007 at 05:12 PM
Wow, that's a pretty radical idea Robert. I'm not sure you'd have the overwhelming support amongst the 20-something generation, but given the current state of house prices it's perhaps not as crazy a notion as it sounded when I first read it.
Posted by: Phil Clark | 22 August 2007 at 11:00 AM