• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Is it worth it? Energy project viability – excellent post from Jamie clearly explains ROI and other ratios.
• Footprint » Q & A on Ropemaker – Fascinating interview with Sarah Cary and others on Ropemaker: "The biomass boiler was driven primarily by the renewables requirement at planning stage in 2006. We also find that the climate for biomass in urban areas has changed, and that air quality issues are driving some local authorities to reconsider biomass. We have received a number of quotes for biomass pellet supply, and consider that we could have a reliable supply for the building if we desired. The price is variable, but it is currently more expensive than using the dual fuel boiler on gas. Given the low heating demands in city offices, the current cost of biomass, and the growing resistance on air quality grounds, we are finding that biomass generally does not currently make sense in urban offices. As Ropemaker Place was under fit-out construction last winter, we have not yet used the biomass. "

Anyway, here’s three blogs to tide you over whilst I’m on holiday for the next 2 weeks:

Rory Bergin – I tend to attend the same events as Rory and his office is just up the road from where I live, yet we’ve still never actually met properly. I’m sure our paths will cross soon. He’s the Head of Sustainability & Innovation at HTA.

oCo Carbon blog by Jamie Bull. Jamie is also on twitter and is good mates with my colleague T. It is a small world. Recommended reading, especially his recent EROEI posts.

Last, and by no means least, Bling No More by my ex-colleague Doug King. I worked with Doug at Max Fordham’s back in 1997/98. He’s infamous for saying Eco-Bling to journalists, and doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to opinion.

• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Stanford engineers’ new solar energy conversion process could revamp solar power production – "A new process that simultaneously combines the light and heat of solar radiation to generate electricity could offer more than double the efficiency of existing solar cell technology, say the Stanford engineers who discovered it and proved that it works. The process, called "photon enhanced thermionic emission," or PETE, could reduce the costs of solar energy production enough for it to compete with oil as an energy source."
• Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Tries to Build an Eco-Friendly House – WSJ.com – Slightly concerned that Sott Adams couldn't leverage his fame to get some decent advice for his self build, but then this article wouldn't have been so entertaining: "The greenest home is the one you don't build. If you really want to save the Earth, move in with another family and share a house that's already built. Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don't want. Don't brag to me about riding your bicycle to work; a lot of energy went into building that bicycle. Stop being a hypocrite like me."
• NewEnergyFocus.com – FiTs data shows “surprise uptake” by commercial sector – "The most up-to-date figures from Ofgem show that between the scheme going live and today (August 9), there have been 5040 installations, with 4969 of them residential, 57 commercial and 13 community installations. Of these, 13 were hydro, 142 wind and 4885 solar PV and the total installed capacity totals 21.9MW."
• INSIGHT: Save What’s Left: Architects as Stewards of Our Planet – "I am not arguing for mindless, indigenous architecture and the elimination of the architectural profession; I am arguing for a new adaptive architecture that clearly understands its regional setting. Our simple goals could be to reduce the consumption of energy in the building sector by 50% in the next 15 years, and then achieve energy neutrality in the built environment 10 years later. These achievements might be analogous to the Manhattan Project or to landing on the moon before the Soviets. The new focus on regionalism and energy conservation would be accompanied by a new attitude toward nature and the landscape, an attitude that seeks to conserve and reintroduce native species and native landscapes."
• Home | VELUX – via Rory Bergin's blog, a tool for modelling energy for domestic properties
• Op-Ed Contributor – Math Lessons for Locavores – NYTimes.com – excellent, though US-centric article on the absurdities of locavorism. Single issue arguments do annoy me.
• bere:architects » Blog Archive » First Welsh Passivhaus prototype – Fenestration Calculations & Cost Data – Hats off to bere:architects for publishing such a wealth of cost data. Lots of useful graphs and data.
• London Housing Design Guide – London Development Agency – "The Mayor’s London Housing Design Guide sets a new benchmark for housing in the capital and will soon be a requirement for publicly-funded homes. By consolidating and simplifying a comprehensive set of standards, the guide aims to provide consistency and clarity about what is expected in London from the outset of a development. The standards are anticipated to be taken forward across all tenures through the Mayor’s forthcoming draft Housing Supplementary Planning Guide (SPG)."
• Boris the builder: The Mayor’s vision for London housing | Life & Style – "Since 1980 there have been no mandatory minimum space standards for housing in the UK, ever since the famous Parker Morris standards for Space in the Home, which were drawn up in 1961, were abolished by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1980. This has led, in recent years, to London having the smallest new houses and apartments of any major city in the Western world — and this at the end of an era of huge economic growth and rises in living standards. A new apartment in London now is estimated to have up to 30 per cent less space than its equivalent of 40 to 50 years ago. The new guide contains 90 standards that will apply from next year on all new housing built on London Development Agency-owned land, or any developments funded by public money. More excitingly, it is hoped that the guide will be part of the updated London Plan after 2012, and as such will be planning policy — meaning it will cover all new housing in the private sector, too."
• grid carbon will stay high for some time yet « carbon limited – "the official line is that the carbon intensity of the grid will remain roughly steady until 2015, when it will plummet towards near-zero carbon in 2040. (As an aside, is it a coincidence that the dropoff comes in 2015, given that it’s the latest possible date for the next general election?) It will be interesting to see how that drop off moves in coming years. The announcement strongly reinforces the message from DECC that decarbonisation of heat will not be achieved through electrification. In other words, heat pumps are not the answer to decarbonising heat at the national scale."

I’m going to use this example as a way of demonstrating some key points with regards the new Part L, which I don’t think everyone in the industry has picked up yet. I am assuming of course that Part L 2010 will come in on 1 October. Perhaps no-one else shares my optimism and are ignoring the changes in the hope they’ll go away and die a slow death.

• Biomass is no longer the silver bullet it was under 2006
• EPC’s in 2010 are on a different scale to EPC’s in 2006, so cannot be compared easily (as we suspected – see the comments following this post in May)
• A building which had an EPC of 40 under Part L 2006, gaining an Excellent under BREEAM 2008, does not automatically pass Part L 2010
• a 25% improvement over 2006 does not automatically mean your building will pass under 2010 – the aggregate approach means there are no easy rules of thumb – and that table which I linked to in this post has disappeared
• An low EPC under Part L 2010 does not guarantee Part L compliance
• The efficiency of building services has by far the greatest effect on ratings

It has turned out to be a very long article so to read the whole thing, see under the fold.

It’s a one storey building, with a 2m² solar thermal array to provide a 10% renewables obligation. The original constructions and HVAC systems are described at the end of this article.

I ran the baseline case through both iSBEM 3.5 and iSBEM 4.0. I then made tweaks in both to see the effect on both compliance (BER<TER) and EPC under both 2006 and 2010. I normally wouldn’t publish this level of data for fear of it being used inaccurately, but it was rather hard to demonstrate the points I wanted to make without doing so. All the usual caveats apply – the data here is for information only, do not sue me if it turns out to be wrong or inaccurate, use your common sense and judgement, blah, blah, blah.

The biggest change to Part L has been the re-casting of the notional building. This means that instead of using a 2002 notional building and adding improvement factors, the notional building is now a 2010 notional building, which varies depending on the fuel used. It’s a subtle change, but it means that the TER changes between fuel types (see table below). The EPC is still calculated using the SER.

The slide above is taken from the IES presentation which I have linked to previously – I’ve not checked that the figures are still the same (the carbon factors have changed since this presentation, so there is a chance the SEER etc might have changed), however the principles remain the same – the TER is MUCH harder to achieve under 2010.

The 2010 results have all been modelled using iSBEM 4.0.a – the software did crash quite a few times, so I’m not convinced it’s too stable yet. There were also some inconsistencies between the EPC when calculated under Part L compliance and under asset rating which concerned me.

Note first of all the differences between the EPC’s under 2006 and 2010. They are no longer directly comparable, which to me seems illogical. I hadinitially worried that this was an error on my part, rather than intentional, so I was delighted to see David Kingstone of Buro Happold coming to the same conclusion:

“Although the definition for the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) reference building has not changed, the way emissions are calculated for an actual building have. This will mean that the resulting EPC rating, assessed from October, will be different to that calculated now.

Consequently, this may result in a change in the EPC rating band, the number of BREEAM energy credits and even the BREEAM rating. However, only by assessing this in detail, and on a range of building types, will the result be known.

I’ve used an EPC benchmark of 40 (which is the minimum for BREEAM excellent) – to get the original building up to 40 under 2006, the only change required was changing the solar thermal to PV (an additional capital cost of ~£3k, but with the FiT, an income generator).

Note that in scenario 3, although we are not yet passing Part L 2010 compliance, the EPC is within the BREEAM requirements for Excellent under BREEAM 2008.

It is possible under scenario 5 to both gain compliance and BREEAM Excellent (assuming BREEAM remains at 40) without any renewables at all, but with some major tweaks to lighting and cooling.

If we use this exact same tweaked model, with excellent building services efficiencies, but swap the fuel to biomass, the building fails Part L compliance. THIS HAS MASSIVE IMPLICATIONS. To pass we need to add a further 20m² of PV. But look at what has happened to the EPC – we are now sitting at 25, which is the minimum standard for BREEAM Outstanding.

I wait with interest to see what happens with BREEAM and the energy credits. I have more to say with regards to Part L and PPS22, the Merton rule and renewables but that will wait for another day.

Contrary to some reports I have seen in the press, air tightness has remained at 10 m²/h/m³ at 50Pa, and has not been improved to 5 m²/h/m³ at 50Pa. I haven’t published the results I got when I changed air tightness to 5 in the table above, but for comparison, for scenario 1 when air tightness is improved from 10 to 5, the BER improves from 48.7 to 47.7 (a much lower effect than improving the lighting, at what potentially might be a much higher cost).

Baseline Constructions and HVAC systems

The initial default air permeability was 25 m³/h/m² at 50 Pa, but I’ve used 10 m³/h/m² at 50 Pa in order to meet compliance.

HVAC Systems

LTHW with floor heating serving the office area which is separately sub-metered, system is on the current ECA list, heating seasonal efficiency of 0.92

Split system with an air source heat pump, serving the workshops and laboratories. System is separately sub-metered, heating seasonal efficiency of 2.8, cooling efficiency of 2.2 and nominal efficiency of 2.75

The plant room and stores have no HVAC systems

Hot Water Systems

Local Calorifier is the same as the LTHW, storage volume of 100 litres with standard factory insulation of 80mm. This will serve the offices only.

Instantaneous hot water seasonal efficiency of 0.75 which will be serving the laboratories.

Solar Thermal

In order to meet the renewable obligation there will be a 2m² evacuated solar tube collector installed.

Lighting

T5’s in all the rooms with auto on-off occupancy sensors

A new ISO standard aims to bridge the gap between regional and national environmental assessment methods by providing a common framework for them to be carried out.

ISO 21931-1:2010 highlights the key issues to be assessed at every stage of a construction project, from design through to operation and refurbishment or deconstruction. Each of these stages impact on a building’s environmental performance throughout its lifetime and assessment methods are integral in determining its overall sustainability.

There is a clear requirement in the construction sector for such assessments to not only be accurate but consistent. An internationally agreed framework will help ensure that buildings are constructed as sustainably as possible whilst enabling projects to be benchmarked and progress monitored.

I’ve read it, so you don’t have to. It’s only 38 pages long though, and most of those are taken up by definitions, so perhaps I’m not as civic minded as first appears.

I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to reproduce without infringing copyright law (10% rings a bell? can anyone clarify?), so I’ve kept the clippings to a minimum.

The ability to measure and understand the environmental performance of buildings is essential for communicating their potential environmental impacts and their influence on sustainable development.

However:

This part of ISO 21931 does not set benchmarks or levels of performance relative to environmental impacts and aspects.

The document is more of an umbrella (for Europe) which will provide common language to enable standards (such as BREEAM, HQE and DGNB) to be relatable to each other.

We’ve long debated if we’ll end up with one environmental standard to rule them all, or continue to have local, national schemes relevant to location. Sustainability tends to be context specific, so having localised standards makes sense (and the path BREEAM is following), and this framework ought to make things easier. Indeed this is picked up in section 4.3:

The environmental performance of a building is influenced by the characteristics of the climatic, social, economic and cultural context of the nation, region and site in which the building is located.

Subject to the aims and objectives of the assessment, the environmental performance of a building shall be expressed by absolute values. In addition, relative values may be used alongside the absolute values. Relative values refer to given contexts and should reflect regionally relevant benchmarks, as appropriate

This document is not specifically calling for data measurement to be exactly replicated across different schemes – there are moves afoot to define common carbon metrics which will make this much easier, but that is not the purpose of this document.

Lifecycle impacts are explicitly encouraged:

All life-cycle stages shall be considered in the assessment. When some stages are not considered or are excluded from the assessment, the reasons for such omission or exclusion shall be clearly explained in the methodology documentation. The assessment report shall state which life-cycle stages are included and which life-cycle stages are excluded.

Interestingly, in the list of impacts to be considered by an assessment method, notable by their absence are physical location and context of the building, and transport. This does not sit comfortably with me – I have never quite forgiven CSH for removing the transport credits from EcoHomes. I suspect given this guidance document, the same may happen in BREEAM.

The document, if anything, enables any European country to come up with their own assessment method. There is nothing in there which negates the use of either BREEAM nor LEED (although lifecycle calculations may need to be tightened up somewhat). In fact, both schemes as they currently stand cover more ground than that which this document calls for.

Do you need to read this document? Probably not. It gives a good broad overview of the benefits of environmental assessments, so might be useful for that.

And now you don’t need to read it. Aren’t I good to you all?

These are my links for August 11th through August 17th:

• It Isn’t Easy Grading Green – GreenSource Magazine – Excellent, must read article on various global green building ratings. so good I couldn’t choose a quote – go read the whole thing.
• Clients wary of Davis Langdon deal with Aecom | Magazine News | Building – My obsession with M&A continues – here the multiplier is on sales rather than profit: “Tony Williams, chairman of consultant Watts, said the merger was an excellent deal for Davis Langdon and as a result other consultants could sell for a higher price. “DL’s price tag is 75% of its sales [based on Aecom’s figure of $430m, or £274m, for the 2009 calendar year]. I’d expect 100% in a bull market and 50% in a bear market. We’re not in a bear market but conditions are pretty difficult, so this is a good deal for DL.” In fact, he argues that it is a better deal than American engineer URS’ purchase of Scott Wilson for £223m, which was 66% of its sales. The result? “We’ve seen two deals where consultants have sold for well over 50%. So I’d say the benchmark is 70% for a decent business. Six weeks ago I’d have said 50-55% but now if I were a vendor I’d look for at least 60%.””
• Residents hit boiling point at the eco tower where turbines don’t turn | News – Oh dear: “But the turbines have barely moved, according to its new residents. They also claim the single boiler down the side of the building is overheating their flats. Resident Nathan Wheelhouse said: “When I left my house the other morning it was 28C at 7.30am — it’s tropical in there. The cold and hot water pipes flow next to each other. I feel like I’m in an eco experiment that has gone wrong at the design stage. I only moved in two weeks ago and I am not enjoying it.” “
• News – ‘Cheap’ solar geoengineering plans may have unintended consequences – The Ecologist – “‘Doing SRM is likely to be cheap,’ said Professor Granger Morgan, head of Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy, ‘so there is risk that a single nation or region might start doing it to solve a local or regional climate problem, and impose the impacts on all of us.’”
• Strata tower wins 2010 Carbuncle Cup | News | Building Design – “The building’s grim stridency is exacerbated by its sporty livery of alternating black and white stripes, configured, needless to say, in voguish barcode distribution. And to literally cap it all off there are the three gargantuan wind turbines at the top. The architect has trumpeted that these could supply 8% of the building’s energy requirements, which seems nothing much to shout about given the enormous expenditure in carbon that has been required to engineer such a baroque arrangement and the fact that this is a part of London that has absolutely no need for the creation of a 147m-tall tower. For services to greenwash, urban impropriety and sheer breakfast- extracting ugliness, we hereby award the 2010 Carbuncle Cup to the Strata tower.”
• A Glimpse of Dubai in Khartoum and Nouakchott: Prestige Urban Projects on the Margins of the Arab World – “We hypothesize that for these cities, located on the margins of the Arab world, prestige projects inspired by the Gulf model epitomize a new way of development based on hypermodernity. They epitomize economic development, success and opulence thanks to oil exploitation. Undergoing discovery and exploitation of oil resources makes the Mauritanian and Sudanese governments hope to follow the same path. Moreover, the towers of Dubai represent a specific cultural model for two states where affiliation to the Arab world is a contested political issue. The comparative approach brings out the importance of foreign investments in these urban transformations, characterized by privatization processes and real estate speculation. The emerging urban model is in strong contrast to the citizens’ expectations and national political unrest.”

Ofgem currently defines typical annual domestic consumption as 20,500 kWh for gas and 3,300 kWh for standard electricity for its pricing analysis work, and much of our general market monitoring. We use these figures to feed into a wide range of analysis, including calculating average annual energy bills and the levels of savings available to consumers who switch. These consumption levels are often quoted in the press and used by others in the energy industry.

Given Government’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions, and technological advances that have lead to increasingly energy efficient homes and appliances, it seems reasonable to assume consumption levels will continue to decline. However, the dataset available is not sufficiently large to confidently model either the magnitude of possible annual declines in the future, or how long this trend may continue.

To establish whether the current typical consumption levels are still reflective of actual consumption, we have reviewed consumption data and analysis from other organisations and considered consumption trends over time. Our review suggests that the figure of 3,300 kWh per year still provides a good estimate of typical annual domestic electricity consumption for those with Profile Class 1 meters. However, we consider that 5,000 kWh, rather than the present level of 6,600 kWh, is more representative of typical medium electricity consumption for consumers with Profile Class 2 meters, and that 16,500 kWh, rather than the present level of 20,500 kWh, would be more representative of current medium domestic gas consumption. We also propose changes to typical low and high annual consumption levels for electricity, Profile Classes 1 and 2, and gas.

If you are interested in participating in the consultation, you have until 24th September to contribute.

Does anyone have a rule of thumb for what the typical data looks like if Passivhaus is applied? The gas will go down again, but to what level?

• Why there are too many public sector chiefs spoiling the broth – Catching up on Jackie's posts – spot-on again: "It is the uncomfortable truth that the only public servants we really want to pay out of our hard earned cash are those that could readily get a job in the private sector if they so chose. We need to apply private sector mores to those that survive the cuts: we need to review what public sector services we need, what delivery structures are most appropriate, what skills, behaviours, attitudes and performance we need from workers and how we should reward and recognise these."
• Davis Langdon & Aecom: A history of mergers and aquisitions | Online News | Building – I *do* love a good M&A – nice potted history of DL: "Aecom have finally acquired Davis Langdon after months of financial wrangling. Both consultants have a long tradition of growth through mergers and aquisitions as their potted histories reveal."
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Green machine: Aircon that doesn’t warm the planet – tech – 27 July 2010 – New Scientist – Excellent article also covers ammonia and thermoacoustic(!!!) cooling: "Compressing CO2 generates much higher temperatures than HFCs – around 150 °C compared with around 60 °C. So Maidment and colleagues are investigating the idea of using the heat generated by CO2-based air-conditioning systems and fridges in supermarkets, for example, to provide hot water for nearby homes."
• Thinking larger than local « – "The RTPI has gone into battle with 28 other groups to ensure the survival of strategic planning. Being careful to avoid any mention of ‘regional’ the new coalition has written to Eric Pickles calling for ‘larger-than-local level’ planning to be enshrined in any reforms to the current system. It’s an impressive array of signatories (and acronyms) with the TCPA, ADEPT, BPF, CPRE, CIH, CIC, CLBA, FoE, ICE, NHF, NHF, POS, RIBA, RSPB, Shelter and WWF all lining up to back strategic planning, some for very different reasons."
• So You Want To Be a Green Building Attorney? : Green Building Law Update – "Green building is not a fad. But it is important to understand that green building is a subset of the overall construction industry. As "green" becomes standard practice, the term "green building" will go away and we will once again primarily refer to just "construction." Anyone interested in green building law should think of it as a niche within a niche. "
• T?F – "The Green City Calculator measures the ‘greeness’ of the city and makes it comparable. This tool for sustainable planning will be developed in this studio. Studio is a collaboration of T?F and Climate Design and Sustainability<br />
  Challenge<br />
  We need to measure the greenness of our cities. We have a lot of labels for buildings. Two for neighbourhoods are in development. But so far, there is no tool to measure and compare cities. We need the Green City Calculator, because cities are crucial in the fight against climate change. We need to measure our effords to know if they have an effect. And to know where we are and how far we need to get."
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

• You’re not bullet proof | Magazine Comment | Building – [Paywall] Great article on LLP: "However, in the event of an LLP going into administration, the partners are likely to lose their capital contributions. Other liabilities are paid out first: mortgages, liquidation fees, employees’ wages for the four months prior to the date of the insolvency order, occupational pension schemes and general unsecured creditors.<br />
  If the partners introduced money as capital, their claim comes after the unsecured creditors. If they introduced the money as debt, they would be treated as unsecured creditors in respect of this money, along with the other unsecured creditors. The partners would also be unsecured creditors in respect of any profits due to them."
• House 2.0: Why are we saving water? – "There are two very simple ways of achieving this goal, and one very complicated one. The simple ways are to 1) charge the right amount for the water and 2) insist that appliances sold should meet defined efficiency standards. The complicated way is what Part G is now insisting on. Which is to try and regulate the end user behaviour by making them purchase water efficient appliances when they are building a new house.<br />
  The problems with this approach are numerous. Firstly, it only applies to new homes. Thus regular power showers will still be available from stores, but you will only be able to buy them if you want to replace an existing bathroom. Can you imagine how infuriating that will be to people building a new home? …<br />
  So what will happen? People will get their eco-shower heads passed by the building inspector, and then rip them out and put in the power showers… Nothing illegal about this at all. It’s just what happens when you make unenforceable regulations like this."

• Worldchanging: Bright Green: Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities? – Read the whole article: “That sort of casual eagerness for the death of others is appalling. Worse, the strategy implicit in this vision of transitioning — that there can be local soft landings in the event of a global hard crash, that indeed the only proper scale at which to prepare for a soft landing is at the local level, and that perhaps collapse will solve some of our problems — is delusional.
  Collapse is not a tool for social change. …. Anyone who thinks an energy descent plan prepared by a community group future-proofs them against people like Charles Taylor has simply taken a vacation from reality.
  Local efforts can’t protect against the violence of a systemic breakdown. …To plan for the collapse of large-scale systems is to plan for widespread evil and suffering; ethical planning for the collapse is impossible: post-collapse idealism is oxymoronic.”
• All power to the wind – it cuts your electricity bills – opinion – 26 July 2010 – New Scientist – “Insofar as there is a problem, it lies in handing control of industrial policy to marginally priced markets. Market-based decisions are not technology-neutral. They favour short-term profits, and that encourages the building of power stations with low capital costs and high marginal costs. That means gas-fired plants, which are tailored to make a profit whether the spot price is high or low.
  In fact, hardly any nuclear or coal-fired plants have been built in the past 15 years, only gas-fired plants, along with renewables installed thanks to support mechanisms such as feed-in tariffs.
  If those mechanisms had been ruled to be market-distorting subsidies and removed, leaving the market to make all the calls, we would see nothing but new gas plants built. This would leave us vulnerable, wondering where tomorrow’s natural gas, on which we would be utterly dependent, would come from – a scenario that has only been prevented because wind turbines receive support.”
• Linking Green Buildings, Productivity and the Bottom Line | Buildings | GreenBiz.com – Interesting stats: “Indeed, the 2003 California report found average annual employee costs to be 10.25 times larger than the cost of space per employee. The author extrapolates these findings to calculate that a 1 percent productivity increase would therefore have a financial impact over time roughly equal to reducing property costs by 10 percent.”
• More than Passive – Michelle Kaufmann Studio – “Although he is introduced to me as “one of the world’s great Passivhaus experts” (and having designed over 100 built Passivhaus homes, he has earned this title), Walter is quick to respond saying that is not the title he wants. He clarifies in our conversation as well as during his very compelling presentation the next day. While Walter commends the Passivhaus intentions, he says that it is about more than that. It is about good design. “Designing a Passivhaus is easy. But we need to make sure we are designing good Architecture as well.” It is much more than just calculations and scientific numbers. “Good architecture is not a scientific result.” His message resonates strongly, as this is a fear of green rating programs in general (whether it be LEED, or other), that some architects will simply follow the checklist and not innovate or design.”
• A Bold New Model for Sustainable Cities – Robert G. Eccles and Amy C. Edmondson – HBS Faculty – Harvard Business Review – “Unlike the real estate developers doing places like Masdar in Abu Dhabi, New Songdo City outside Seoul, and Dongtan in Shanghai (basically “green” real estate plays with a “let’s build it and hope they come” approach), Living PlanIT’s model is to create an ecosystem of large and small company partners that will focus on creating products and services for sustainable urbanization. The people that the partners bring in to produce those products and services will be the anchor occupants of the model city. The hope is that this activity will then attract other businesses and inhabitants.”
• Commercial Lighting Solutions: Login – With lighting set to be the bete noir of Part L 2010, this looks intriguing (but US based): “The Commercial Lighting Solutions provide actionable “how to” guidance on ways to improve your building interior lighting efficiency and reduce your energy consumption, without compromising quality design criteria. Strategies include the use of high performance commercially available products, daylighting, and lighting controls, all within the context of integrated designs supported by performance specifications.”
• A Reporter at Large: The Island in the Wind : The New Yorker – Fascinating article on renewable energy in Denmark: “The biggest disappointment, though, had to do with consumption.
  “We made several programs for energy savings,” he told me. “But people are acting—what do you call it?—irresponsibly. They behave like monkeys.” For example, families that insulated their homes better also tended to heat more rooms, “so we ended up with zero.” Essentially, he said, energy use on the island has remained constant for the past decade.”
• Building4Change : Are airtight homes good or bad for occupant health? – “There is already strong evidence that energy efficient homes have a positive impact on occupants’ physical and mental wellbeing. Basic improvements in indoor temperature levels in winter and reduction in fuel poverty can have a significant impact. But there is a shortage of evidence to inform decision-making in this area and it is vital that risks to public health are not increased
  There are a number of areas where more knowledge is needed. Although 0.5 air changes per hour is the accepted norm, we lack a definitive assessment of a safe minimum level of ventilation. There is no comprehensive study on the part that home ventilation plays in ensuring health. We have insufficient knowledge of the actual ventilation rates being achieved in UK homes, impacts of ventilation system design, installation and operation, and impacts of occupant behaviour.”
• How to test your decision-making instincts – McKinsey Quarterly – Strategy – Strategic Thinking – This means that to protect decisions against bias, we first need to know when we can trust our gut feelings, confident that they are drawing on appropriate experiences and emotions. There are four tests.
  1. The familiarity test: Have we frequently experienced identical or similar situations?
  2. The feedback test: Did we get reliable feedback in past situations?
  3. The measured-emotions test: Are the emotions we have experienced in similar or related situations measured?
  4. The independence test: Are we likely to be influenced by any inappropriate personal interests or attachments?
• Enough With Jane Jacobs Already | By Andrew Manshel – WSJ.com – An odd article, but it reminded me of the existence of Whyte’s video “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces”, which can be found online, worth hunting out: “More attention ought to be paid to the finely grained thinking of William H. Whyte and less to Jacobs’s overblown pronouncements and unprovable theories. Whyte was a close observer of people’s behavior in public spaces and emphasized the importance of the many subtle design features that make people comfortable in parks, plazas and public buildings. Following Whyte, designers, planners and community members need to pay more attention to proven, good ideas, to established data and to the fine points of landscapes and buildings.”
• They don’t build them like they used to: Steve Mouzon’s Original Green | Kaid Benfield’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC – ‘Original green’ means common-sense things like building with high ceilings, cross-ventilation and shading in warm climates, and building with steep roofs and southern exposure in cool ones. It means using original forms of transportation, such as walking and bicycling, whenever possible, and designing and inhabiting communities that facilitate such self-propulsion. It means growing food nearby, and ‘living local’ as much as possible. It means accepting a wider ‘comfort range’ of temperature; our ancestors, Steve points out, were adaptable and reasonably comfortable within a range of 30 degrees or so Fahrenheit; today people fight over two degrees’ difference in ‘thermostat wars.’ Original green places and buildings have intinsically smaller environmental footprints than conventional buildings and places, especially when lifecycle effects are included, and in many cases even if the conventional ones have the benefit of green technology.
• Theses on Sustainability | Orion Magazine – Worth reading the entire artcile: “THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment.”
• Dynamic Thermal Properties Calculator – Free excel tool, includes decrement, admittance and kappa values: “The motivation for producing this tool is a growing need among architects and engineers for more information about the thermal properties of construction elements other than just their U-value. This is needed to help optimise the passive performance of buildings and ensure a high level of inherent energy efficiency. Going forward, it is likely that far more attention will be paid to getting this right given the forthcoming changes to Part L and SAP. Another driver is the issue of climate change adaptation, which is starting to result in greater scrutiny construction materials and their thermal properties.”
• Climate change weather file generator – CCWeatherGen – Adaptation is flavour of the month: “The CCWeatherGen tool allows you to generate TMY2 or EPW climate change weather files with a few mouse clicks. You can produce ‘morphed’ climate change as well as ‘unmorphed’ present day TMY2 and EPW files from the original CIBSE/Met Office TRY/DSY format files. The CCWeatherGen tool is made available free of charge. However, it is solely distributed WITHOUT the required baseline weather files and/or climate change scenario data!”
• 2degrees : Discussion Topic – “BSI has announced the launch of its new Kitemark® scheme for Energy Reduction Verification (ERV) which will independently verify and certify those organisations that achieve a reduction in carbon emissions through lower energy use. The Environment Agency has approved the scheme as one of the Early Action Metrics that contribute to the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme, the UK’s mandatory climate change and energy saving scheme.”