Elemental

These are my links for September 24th through September 26th:

• Fabric Insulation – ways of further raising performance standards for all types of building fabric: BD 2428 – Planning, building and the environment – Communities and Local Government – This report summarises building thermal performance requirements in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands and classifies them according to the approach taken (elemental unit-based approach, target U-value average heat transmission through the building envelope, heat demand calculation or integrated energy use calculation).
  The regulations are compared to each other and contrasted with United Kingdom building codes.
• Minister pledges zero-carbon homes definition consultation ’shortly’ – The Government expects to begin consultation on the final definition of zero-carbon homes shortly, planning minister Caroline Flint told the Labour Party Conference in Manchester.
  The minister confirmed that the issue of how the zero-carbon definition dealt with on and offsite green generation remained the most challenging element of the form of words which would be consulted on.
  The fringe meeting heard that Government-commissioned research into the zero-carbon target had highlighted problems over the availability of some of the key technologies and an estimate that the new standards could add between 17 and 24 per cent to the costs of a new home.
  The conference also learnt that the standard would be significantly harder to achieve in high-density, urban infill schemes compared to more large-scale non infill projects.
• How eco-towns can support living within ecological limits – Cutting-edge principles for the agencies involved in developing proposals for eco-towns have been published by BioRegional and CABE. The report, What makes an eco-town?, defines an eco-town as a place designed to make it easy for residents to reduce their ecological footprint by two thirds and their carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent below 1990 levels.
• Patrick Barkham talks to Tony Wrench about low-impact housing in … – Closure on the Welsh Hobbit house planning controversy: "After a long struggle with the authorities, Wrench got retrospective approval for his home, tucked away in a valley in south-west Wales, via an unusual planning policy experiment in Pembrokeshire. County council and Pembrokeshire Coast National Park planners agreed to allow for low-impact developments on rural land where normal houses would not be considered, as long as they met stringent environmental, economic and social criteria."
• Environment Agency – Green roof toolkit – GLA green roof toolkit.

mel starrs News bioregional, carbon, checklist, competitors, definition, design, ECOTOWNS, european, fabric, GLA, green, hobbit, house, Housing, London, pdf, performance, planning, report, roof, toolkit, u-values, wales, zero

These are my links for August 10th through August 15th:

• Blogs – RIBApedia – RIBApedia opens it's doors. Under the blogs page: "Blogs (or webblogs) are diaries written and disseminated on the web." Tempted to log-in and start tweaking stuff but the rules of engagement aren't clear? Do you have to be an architect to participate?
• Wright’s Palmer House Put on the Market | News | Architectural Record – Cheap at half the price:"The Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Palmer House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, acclaimed by historians as one of the architect’s best residential projects, has been put up for sale by the family of the original owners. The asking price is $1.5 million."
• Making Energy-Saving Buildings – Forbes.com – …the vision behind a new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) "net-zero energy" commercial building initiative launched Tuesday. The program's goal, set forth in a section of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, is to get net-zero energy commercial buildings of all types up and running in the U.S. by 2025. At the moment, however, this is not economically feasible. "You could build a building that's net-zero energy-efficient today, but the utility savings are not sufficient to pay back that investment over the life cycle of the building," says David Rodgers, the DOE's deputy assistant secretary for energy efficiency.
• AIA Deconstructs Green-Building Standards| News | Architectural Record – While officially neutral on green-building rating systems, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) recently parsed three of them in an effort to evaluate how well they align with the association’s sustainability goals. In its report, which was released in May, it carefully avoided picking a favorite of the three systems: t he U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED NC 2.2, the Green Building Initiative’s Green Globes, and The International Initiative for a Sustainable Environment’s SBTool 07.
• Castlemore’s Waverley Gate project awarded EPC – Building Services Journal – The fun that can be had with statistics. For example:"Castlemore’s Waverley Gate development in Edinburgh has been awarded an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC), placing it in the top 11% of sustainable commercial buildings in the UK.". No mention of where the 11% came from. Which list of sustainable commercial buildings are they talking about? The building gets a C by the way.

mel starrs News architects, DOE, EPC, FLW, Green_Globes, house, LEED, RIBA, social_media, statistics, US, wiki, zero_carbon

What I’ve been reading about:

• Reader’s Rant – Building Services Journal – "BREEAM is about environmental damage reduction and not about sustainable development. Yet BREEAM is increasingly interpreted within the construction sector as being a metric for sustainable development. Use of the terms ‘very good’ and ‘excellent’ have become misleading because they are hijacked to mean ‘more sustainable’ to one degree or another. In fact, it would be more accurate to call buildings achieving these ratings as BREEAM ‘not as bad as most’ or BREEAM ‘a bit less harmful’."
• IES enters free DEC software market – Building – Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) has developed a free alternative to the Government’s ORCalc Display Energy Certifiacte (DEC) software. The Glaswegian firm is planning on a late-August launch.
  The company said the software allowed users to produce DECs and the attached advisory reports as well as facilitate lodgements.
  Benefits over ORCalc listed by the company include: no restriction on the number of building zones (benchmark categories); user-friendly input Web based access; personal user area to store and manage DEC submissions; and ability to save and move between the different sections of the submission
• Hobbits in a hole – Building Design – My favourite tacky hobbit houses in Oregon are in trouble. I could go and snap one up at a bargain auction price…
• Kevin McCloud’s own ‘grand design’ in chaos – Building Design – Read this article, and especially the comments. As usual when a 'design guru' such as Kevin McHeadintheClouds (or Wayne Hemingway to name another, or indeed Germaine Greer, who isn't even a designer) gets involved in 'real' projects, they get hauled over the coals by those who have considerable more experience and a much more realistic view. Poor Kev.
• Small Scale Wind Energy | Carbon Trust – A new Carbon Trust study into the potential of small-scale wind energy has found that small wind turbines could provide up to 1.5 Terawatt Hours (TWh) per year of electricity (0.4% of total UK electricity consumption) and 0.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) emission savings. This is based on 10% of households installing turbines at costs competitive with grid electricity, which is currently around 12p per kWh.
  The study also indicates that for the UK as a whole, the majority of electricity and carbon savings are available from small turbines in rural areas – four times as much as urban areas irrespective of costs, and considerably more given economic drivers. This is mainly due to wind speeds generally being higher in rural areas. Turbines in some rural locations could provide cheaper electricity than the grid, but it appears that in many urban situations, roof-mounted turbines may not pay back their embedded carbon emissions.
• Expert tells legislators in city the price of oil will drop | NewsOK.com – Todd Buchholz (author of "new ideas from dead economists", former advisor to Bush and technophile predicts:"Oil will peg out two years from now being closer to $50 a barrel, which is still high enough to make those alternative fuels worth pursuing.” He said he wouldn't be surprised if discussions took place two years from now about keeping the price of oil from getting too low so it "doesn't pull the rug out from solar, wind and clean coal technology.”

mel starrs News architects, BREEAM, carbon_trust, DEC, Economics, EPC, hobbit, house, Housing, ies, learned, lessons, oil, Oregon, report, Software, Sustainable_development, wind