Costs confusion

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The glut of sustainability reports continues. How many major documents have been published this year and how many trees does that equate to? One released by the Renewables Advisory Board put the cost of hitting Code 6 in terms of the need for renewables as an average of £6K. Cue some laughter from a QS I spoke with this morning. Alliance & Leicester has also come up with some figures this week claiming that it will cost homeowners £9,000 to make their properties carbon neutral. I'm not sure guestimates such as these are really helping matters much.

Comments

[Matthew Spencer]

I guess QS's are paid to be sceptical about costs, but I would encourage readers to look at the costs in the RAB report, as we put alot of time into making them as robust and transparent as possible.

All costs and cost assumptions can be found in the Appendix, and have been tested with suppliers and building engineeers. The costs do not include building fabric upgrades associated with higher thermal efficiency, or any profit margin by main contractors . They relate to the direct additional cost of energy generation and its infrastructure.

The costs of between £2k and £12k ( average 6k) produced by Element Energy for the report inevitably contain uncertainty but are in line with other estimates produced by Faber Maunsell for the South West of England Regional Assembly.

[Phil Clark]

Thanks for the response Matthew. It may well be worth me feeding this back to my QS contact to see exactly what his scepticism refers to. I think his general point was that clients will immediately think 'it will only cost me 6 grand to get code level 6' when the true cost is far from that. Perhaps that perception is more a reflection of the way I wrote the original article on the Building website.