Elemental

These are my links for February 28th from 13:17 to 13:17:

• Cutting the Carbon – Presentations – All the presentations from the Camden Passivhaus conference, including Paul Smyth, Justin Bere, Chot Chong, Liz Reason and Mark Elton.

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These are my links for February 12th through February 18th:

• Building4Change : California to make energy and water saving mandatory – CALGREEN's approach, with its mandatory provisions being inspected and verified by local and state building departments and confirmed in a green label, has led to concerns that it confuses building standards and certification. Questions are being asked in the USA about a number of issues, in particular, lack of third-party assessment and the code's potential to reduce adoption of points-based certification routes, notably LEED.
• The Race to be the Greenest Building – Some great case studies: "The Living Building Challenge, run by the Cascadia Green Building Council, is growing in popularity these days. Referred to as one of the most advanced green building rating systems in the world, it's growing, I believe, in part because of its rigor. The Challenge is performance based, which means a project has to perform as modeled for one full year prior to receiving certification."
• Thoughts on the Renewable Heat Incentive – "As it stands, this incentive will cause oil-fired boilers (as a technology) to be abandoned, without any clear justification. Many people with radiator-based central heating systems looking to replace a boiler will be tempted to switch to a heat pump solely because of the incentive, which looks like it's going to worth around £750-£1,000 a year for 18 years. And yet, unless the heat delivery system is changed (which is unlikely because it would be expensive and disruptive), the energy and carbon burned will actually increase, compared to an A rated oil-fired boiler. For this reason, air source heat pumps, in particular, are ill suited to replacing domestic boilers. There seems little logic in incentivising people to install them instead of efficient fossil-fuel boilers."
• House 2.0: 36 hours in Switzerland – Is a supra-national standard possible? "The Swiss have their own energy saving performance standard called Minergie. It comes in various format. Standard Minergie, Minergie P (roughly equivalent to PassivHaus), Minergie P Eco (with other sustainability features like water saving) and Minergie P Eco Plus (with added renewables). Obviously, this system is never going to be of interest to anyone other than the Swiss; it's all rather like the Code for Sustainable Homes in this respect. Yet another reminder as to how good it would be to have a supra-national standard that everyone could understand."

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These are my links for January 29th through February 3rd:

• Inbuilt gains official status to approve Passivhaus buildings – Inbuilt has been awarded the highly-prized status of Certifying Body for Passivhaus buildings. Passivhaus is a design methodology for ultra low-energy buildings, promoted by the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt, Germany. There are about 12,500 Passivhaus buildings worldwide, the vast majority of them in Germany and Austria, and the approach is rapidly growing in popularity in the UK as developers and designers consider their options to meet the Government's zero carbon targets.
  Inbuilt is now one of a tiny handful of organisations in the UK, and just 20 worldwide, who are accredited by the Passivhaus Institut to offer certification services. Certification provides a robust assessment of a building’s predicted energy use and allows an architect or builder to claim the 'Passivhaus' tag for a building and to market it as meeting the scheme's very precise performance standards. In the UK, only three individual buildings have been formally certificated so far.
• NGS GreenSpec – Opinion – Quality Assured PassivHaus Buildings – Part 1 – Excellent piece on Passivhaus by Mark Siddall of Devereux Architects (despite the mandatory slightly shrill rant against CSH/BREEAM which detracts from the piece, IMO). Covers the quality assurance aspects very well and explains why PHPP needs to be used. First of two articles – read both.
• Factor 4 efficiency illustrated by contemporary economic statistics 20100117_wf – Interesting analysis from Wolfgang Feist on CO2 vs. GNI and life expectancy.
• Zero carbon definition offers a new practical approach – EC Harris comment on zero carbon definition: "The revised cost of complying with the new zero carbon definition will depend on the value attributed to the ‘Allowable Solution’ and also the renewable strategy adopted to deliver the 45-50% renewables.
  However, the fabric efficiencies have been reported as adding between £2,000 -£6,500 per unit and the renewables requirement is likely to add around £15,000 per unit. This results in an additional build cost of £20,000 per unit but represents half the previous £40,000 estimate to deliver the full Code Level 6 definition.
  Astute house builders will therefore see opportunity in the new definition, with commercial advantage gained by selecting sites and design solutions which allow on site renewable costs to be minimised either through connection with district heating or large scale wind coupled with the use of an ESCO. Renewable availability of a site must now be considered in land acquisition and existing land banks reviewed."
• News analysis – Is aid without climate adaptation a waste of time? – The Ecologist – However, some NGOs have been amending an existing emergency relief strategy, Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR), to integrate climate science into their work. DRR uses past events to help the community become more resilient to them in the future. Integrating climate science in DRR plans involves taking account of future predictions for a given area, such as flooding or sea level rises. ‘DRR enables humanitarian agencies to extend the time horizon and to mitigate rather than just respond,' says Dr. Mike Edwards, climate change programme development officer CAFOD.

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These are my links for January 23rd through January 26th:

• Not the last straw: Homes made from straw bales make a comeback | MNN – Mother Nature Network – Volunteer labour makes costing straw bale difficult: "Though the materials used for straw bale buildings – straw & plaster – are typically inexpensive, the special knowledge required to design & build these structures usually means that labor costs can be anywhere between 10 percent and 20 percent higher than for traditional buildings, though some of that cost is made back through energy efficiency.
  “The construction of these buildings takes a person who’s done tons of training to really understand exactly how to get the material to behave,” says Moore. “It just ends up costing the consumer too much money for the benefit it produces.”
  In addition, straw bales can create extra hassle in terms of coordinating their delivery from local farmers, having a big enough job site to store all the bales and keeping them dry during construction.
  One way that people help keep labor costs down is to throw “bale raising” parties where friends & family members help stack bales and plaster walls."
• Forget Sustainability, It’ s Time to Talk Resilience – "There's a new concept infiltrating the climate change conversation, and it has the potential to change the conversation altogether. It’s time to give sustainability a rest and start talking about resilience, Rob Hopkins writes in Resurgence.
  “The term ‘resilience’ is appearing more frequently in discussions about environmental concerns, and it has a strong claim to actually being a more successful concept than that of sustainability. Sustainability and its oxymoronic offspring sustainable development are commonly held to be a sufficient response to the scale of the climate challenge we face: to reduce the inputs at one end of the globalised economic growth model (energy, resources, and so on) while reducing the outputs at the other end (pollution, carbon emissions, etc.). However, responses to climate change that do not also address the imminent, or quite possibly already passed, peak in world oil production do not adequately address the nature of the challenge we face.”"
• House 2.0: The Denby Dale Passive House – "Because of all this, the house down the end of Geoff and Kate’s garden has assumed a significance they cannot have dreamt of when they first contacted Bill Butcher. It’s not just a low energy house, it’s a Passive House. And it’s not just a Passive house, it’s an assault craft landing on the beach that is the Code for Sustainable Homes. By 2016, when in theory the Code should kick in fully and all new homes should be “zero carbon”, you would not be allowed to build this house. For a start, it is going to have a gas boiler — not permitted under Code Level 6. And it will have nothing in the way of home-generated electricity (although the Feed-In-Tariff coming on stream later this year may cause Geoff and Kate to reconsider)."
• Archinect : Views : Victory Gardens, or the Impact of the Financial Crisis on Architecture – Gloomy, but worth reading the whole article: "The hard part is going to be for architects to understand just how this is healthy for the profession. First, architects have hardly raised their productivity since the integration of digital design tools into their work. Sure, designs have gotten much more complex, but more isn’t always more. Many firms have wound up wasting labor on gimmicky designs produced by an army of interns. Now those firms are going to finally begin using technology the way it was meant to be. Watch as fifty-person firms shrink to five or ten core employees. Instead of talking about the cool things that digital technology can make, architects are going to talk about how fast and efficient digital technology makes them.
  That will be a huge paradigm-shift and will lead to more interesting work along the way."
• Sustainability: Carbon reduction – Building – Everything you need to know about CRC: "So is the financial liability placed on organisations by the CRC significant enough to demonstrate a convincing business case for improving energy performance in existing buildings? Not quite. However, the business case becomes more compelling when energy savings are taken into account as shown in the table below.
  Early investment in more energy efficient systems can reap significant savings in terms of reduced energy costs. The example shows the initial investment paid back in less than four years. If early action is difficult due to the current economic climate, then appropriate investment in time for the capped phase (2013) will also significantly reduce CRC liability and generate substantial energy savings. "

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These are my links for January 3rd through January 7th:

• She Just Walks Around With It: What I Would Tell Any Recent College Graduate – Wise words from Kristy: "That is NOT the same as liking what a company does, seeing a company that has lots of potential and potentially cool jobs, and just not liking some aspects of your current job there. Every job — especially in the beginning, good lord — comes with some "sh*t work": dumb things that just have to get done, and that you just have to do.
  Oh, I could write a manual about Success in the Workplace at the Entry-to-Mid Level.
  My point, really, is that every corporate job is going to suck to some degree. If it sucks and you totally can't see any reason to stay except for the paycheck, look for something else. If aspects of it suck but the long-term (1-3 year) potential is evident, don't screw up a good thing by focusing on the stupid."
• House 2.0: On Housing Benefit – Mark's B&W view of housing: "The problem is essentially that we have created a two-tier housing market. There is the private sector, which is expensive and insecure (esp. for renters), and the social/council sector which is cheap and very secure. And subsidised to the tune of £20billion a year…. It doesn’t strike at the root of the problem, which is that there are two different markets operating and cheap and secure housing is always going to be preferable to expensive and insecure, even more so now as windfall profits from owning private housing have been put on hold.
  A more logical solution would be to have just one housing market. To do that, you have two options. One would be to privatise the social/council house sector, and remove all housing benefit, instead supporting the poor by some other method – for instance, giving them money and letting them decide how to spend it. Alternatively, you could nationalise all housing and have it all rented out by the state."
• The enduring influence of architect Christopher Alexander, author of A Pattern Language. – By Witold Rybczynski – Slate Magazine – Most people discover Alexander through his classic, A Pattern Language, which appeared in 1977. Small and fat (more than 1,000 pages), printed on fine paper, and bound in a plain maroon cover embossed with a gold escutcheon, it resembles a Latin breviary. Its author's ambitious goal was nothing less than to catalog the entire built environment—from towns to bedrooms—as a collection of discrete "patterns," 253 of them. Each pattern was explained, supported by research, and illustrated by sketches and photographs. The patterns were linked to one another, showing which ones worked well together, and arranged hierarchically from large to small. "Neighborhood Boundaries," for example, suggests that strong neighborhoods require clear edges and restricted access. At the other end of the scale, "Ceiling Height Variety" observes that buildings with uniform ceilings are uncomfortable and recommends varying ceiling heights between large and small rooms to create different degrees of intimacy.
• CIBSE > About Building Services > Ken Dale Travel Bursary – The Ken Dale Travel Bursary makes awards available of between £1,500 and £4,000 to CIBSE members in the developmental stage of their career who wish to spend three to four weeks outside their own country researching aspects connected to their field of work and which will benefit CIBSE, their employer, their clients and the profession. CIBSE is especially keen to encourage applicants to take-up the award for research that articulates CIBSE's concern for the environment.

  The Bursary also offers the candidate the opportunity to experience technical, economic, environmental, social and political conditions in another country and to examine how these factors impact the practice of building services engineering.

• David Barrie: A New Deal for urban regeneration – Via Phil Clark on twitter, a great new blog find and a great post too: "Economic productivity today is increasingly linked with social welfare – and there's an ever-increasing recognition of a feedback loop between welfare, natural resources and economic development.
  In other words, sustainability is slowly but surely coming to mean not just environmental justice and intergenerational value but intra-generational value and equity"
• Blog | Yudelson Associates | Australian Efficient Building Scheme Allows Buildings to Trade Carbon Reductions – “An Efficient Building Scheme is identical to an emissions trading scheme except that it recognizes energy efficiency improvements in non-residential buildings, rather than emissions avoided. Simply put, it treats one ton of greenhouse gas emissions that is not emitted because energy is not used, in the same way that a conventional Emissions Trading Scheme treats one ton of CO2 that is not emitted due to a change in energy generation methods.” In other words, it’s far better to reduce demand than to fiddle with what the power plant has to emit to meet the (higher) demand of a building that wasn’t upgraded in terms of energy requirements.
• Anna Minton’s blog: Boris’ ‘Manifesto’ to keep public space public – "Surprised and pleased to see Boris Johnson call for public space to remain genuinely public. In his ‘Manifesto for Public Space’, which goes under the heading, ‘London’s Great Outdoors’, Boris writes that “there is a growing trend towards the private management of publicly accessible space” and that where this “corporatisation” occurs, “Londoners can feel themselves excluded from parts of their own city”. But he makes clear “this need not be the case” pointing to the Kings Cross development where it has been agreed that the local authority will retain control of the streets and public areas – ‘adopt’ the streets to use the jargon. He explicitly states: “This has established an important principle which should be negotiated in all similar schemes.”"
• BBC News – No central heating in new homes – Reading this, it screams of Passivhaus, yet isn't mentioned at all?: "The properties will be made air-tight and will be fitted with triple-glazed windows.
  They will also contain a "whole house ventilation" system which will recover at least 80% of the heat from stale air in the home and redistribute it into a supply of fresh filtered air.
  The executive director of Habitat for Humanity in Northern Ireland, Peter Farquharson, said the ambitious plan would "fundamentally change how people view new homes" and have a "far-reaching impact for the community and the sector"."
• Future Friendly Homes » The Passive House Solution | Certified Passive House Consultant | How Passive House works and why it matters – Passivhaus taking over the world? A good overview from an accredited practicioner stateside: "It is now available in the US. Consultants, projects or building components that have obtained the right to carry the logo have committed themselves to design excellence and the Passive House energy performance criteria. I am a Certified Passive House Consultant, one of 200 in the US and the first in the state of CT to provide this service."

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These are my links for November 14th through November 19th:

• Welcome to amazonails – Enerything you ever needed to know about straw bale building.
• Footprint » Common carbon language – "The ‘Common Carbon Metric’ will be piloted by the leading green building rating tools and made available to anyone dedicated to promoting the understanding and development of a low-carbon built environment. The real impact of this initiative lies in the detail which has yet to be announced, but it is an indication of the growing consensus about the role the built environment can play in mitigating climate change."
• Publications – News & Publications | BioRegional: solutions for sustainability – via Hattie at AJ, I find that BioRegional are making lots of their reports free. Will be interesting to read the One Planet Communities and compare to BREEAM, LEED and Estidama. Communities (rather than buildings) will be the buzzword for 2010. Unfortunately Pooran Desai's book is not free, but can be ordered from Amazon.
• marklynas.org | Closed because of geoengineering works – Mark Lynas on geo-engineering (something I'm really not comfortable with): "Geoengineering deeply divides scientists and environmentalists. Should we really consider spraying sulphates into the stratosphere, planting artificial trees across deserts or dumping iron filings in the Pacific as legitimate options to cool down our planet? Kruger, whose preferred solution involves spreading billions of tonnes of lime in the oceans (see cquestrate.com), likens the approach to having an airbag in a car: it’s better not to crash, but also sensible to insure against the risk that the worst will happen. Plus, “the time to design an airbag is before you are skidding on ice”."
• Predicted vs. Actual: Closing the Gap – "Marcus Sheffer, chair of LEED’s Energy and Environment Technical Advisory Group (TAG), shared some ideas under consideration for the next update to the rating system slated for 2012. The group is closely looking at LEED’s energy credits so that energy simulations more accurately predict performance. For example, the TAG is looking at ways to encourage modeling earlier and more frequently in the design process. “We need to change the practice of validation modeling at the end of a project,” said Sheffer. “We need more iterative modeling.” "
  Interesting comment after the article – can we *really* predict performance?
• Three older houses to be Passivhaus retrofitted – "An architects practice is being funded by the Technology Strategy Board to undertake design and feasibity studies into a proposed scheme to retrofit three empty houses to Passivhaus standard. The Retrofit for the Future competition is designed to address the challenge laid down by the government's target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by the year 2050."
• Announcing Living Building Challenge Version 2.0 — ILBI – For those unfamiliar with ILBI, think of it as uber-LEED: "Version 2.0 of the Living Building Challenge expands its focus to local food production, unrestricted access to nature, no gated communities and other equity issues."

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These are my links for October 24th through October 29th:

• Campaign calls for strengthened renewables policy – PlanningResource – "Ministers pledged in July to update the guidance in PPS1 and PPS22 to "ensure that they set a clear and challenging framework for delivering energy infrastructure consistent with national ambitions."
  TCPA energy policy manager Kate Henderson said: "The planning system can play a key part in tackling climate change by ensuring we get the right amount of renewable energy, by encouraging carbon zero development and by shaping development which reduces the need to travel by car.
  "But despite some excellent rhetoric, much of the planning system is still locked in the age of stupid. It allows carbon intensive development and often refuses real solutions to climate change such as renewable energy projects."
  Ministers plan to publish a draft new PPS on climate change and renewable energy by the end of the year, with the aim of adopting new guidance before the end of the current parliament."
• Energy standards for homes to fall short of Passivhaus – Building – The death knell for CSH?: "The Hub has proposed a radical overhaul, with builders asked to meet an annual energy output per square metre depending on building type, rather than satisfy the points-based system operated by the code."
• UK must replace 12 million non-condensing boilers by 2022 says CCC – CCC recommends that: "Non-residential buildings achieve a minimum Energy Performance Certificate rating of F or higher by 2020."
• SuperFreakonomics Ignores the Business Case for Sustainability – Andrew Winston – HarvardBusiness.org – I have largely missed the Superfreakonomics geo-engineering debate – this is a good starting point. Hoping to catch Levitt and Dubner at LSE later this month – some pointed questions will be ready…
• Statistics watchdog hits out at government emissions claim – PlanningResource – "The government has been exaggerating the UK's success in cutting carbon emissions, according to the UK Statistics Authority.A Department of Energy and Climate Change claim that carbon emissions were 12.8 per cent lower in 2007 than in 1990 is "unsatisfactory" and falls short of the government's code of practice for official statistics, said the watchdog's chairman Sir Michael Scholar.In a letter to the Commons environmental audit committee chairman Tim Yeo, he said nearly a third of that fall is made up of carbon credits in the EU trading scheme and do not represent real
  cuts. The fall is 8.5 per cent without the credits."
• RIBA to bin ‘outdated’ fee scale graphs | News | Architects Journal – So everyone will be laminating their old copy then? : "The RIBA is to drop its fee scale graphs in the latest edition of A Clients Guide to Engaging an Architect.
  The loss of the graphs, which featured percentage fees based on independent cost survey data, marks the demise of the institutes once compulsory fee scales abolished as mandatory in 1982 and as recommended scales in 1992.
  The RIBA maintained the revised guide would still contain concise written advice about how practices calculate fees and structure payment options."
• PassivHaus UK – My current obsession with U-values unearthed this gem: "Please note that whilst PHPP includes a worksheet for calculating the U-values of components it is not sufficiently accurate for demonstrating compliance against UK building regulations as it does not adhere to BRE document Conventions for U-value calculations (2006 Edition). Whilst the U-value calculator incorporated within PHPP is used as a basis for certification purposes designers are recommended to use suitable U-value calculator software packages for demonstrating UK building regulations compliance and undertaking SAP calculations, suitable software includes BRE's own U-value calculator, or other software packages such as BuildDesks free U-value calculator."
• Climate Change (Political Response): 21 Oct 2009: House of Commons debates (TheyWorkForYou.com) – Andrew Stunell (Lib Dem) reminds us all of a forgotten Bill during last week's 1010 debate: "In 2004, I was fortunate to be top of the ballot and able to introduce the Sustainable and Secure Buildings Bill in this House. I wish to say to the House and to the Minister that there have been missed opportunities as a consequence of the Government not choosing to implement what was in that Bill, which allowed them to amend the building regulations to take account of the sustainability and efficiency of buildings."
  Worth reading the entire debate (despite the outcome)

admin News BRE, carbon, CCC, CSH, Economics, emissions, EPC, fee, government, hub, lib_dem, passivhaus, PPS, SAP, scale, TCPA, u-values, zero

These are my links for October 5th through October 7th:

• Energy Efficiency Partnership for Homes – Partnership Publications – EEPH/CLG report: "This report presents results and findings of the joint EEPH (Energy Efficiency Partnership for Homes) and Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) project to study the levels of compliance with Part L of the Building Regulations.
  Specifically, it presents the results from a study of compliance for new dwellings built since April 2006 in accordance with Approved Document L1A (2006). The results for the full sample for the 2nd Phase of the project are presented"
• The future of green building in China – ClimateChangeCorp.com – Interesting (long) article on green building in China: "Perceived high cost is another barrier. When a World Business Council for Sustainable Development survey in 2007 asked the real estate developers and building professionals worldwide how much more they thought green buildings cost than normal buildings, the Chinese respondents said they thought certified green buildings cost 28% more. They were unaware that in China the average extra cost for a LEED certified building has been 3-5% more. This figure is similar to the global average incremental cost for LEED certified buildings.
  Lewis says as long as the Chinese developers have a perception that green buildings cost a quarter more, they will surely not go for green projects."
  China’s green building targets
  * Reduce building energy use in all cities by 50% by 2010 and 65% by 2020 (base year 1980)
  * Top 1000 State Owned Enterprises Programme aims to improve energy efficiency in the largest SOEs by 2010…
• Target Zero – About Target Zero – AECOM have been commissioned by Corus and BCSA: "The aim of this project is to understand the implications of the UK Government's move towards 'zero carbon' for five steel framed non-domestic building types.
  Target Zero will research and cost options for improving operational energy consumption and reducing embodied energy and other life-cycle impacts. The fully costed solutions generated will demonstrate how to achieve the three highest BREEAM ratings and meet the anticipated changes to Part 'L' of the Building Regulations."
• Zerofootprint » Communities – Interesting competition to retrofit a post-war, pre-90's concrete building and operate at net zero for a year. Their definition of net zero is on-site NOT community level, and by my reckoning excludes biomass: "All the energy required to power household amenities, cool, heat, and light the building must be provided on a net zero basis. Possible onsite energy systems can include wind, solar, bio-fuel cells (from occupant produced organic waste), hydrogen cells, etc. Energy must be produced by devices located within the building and its nearby property, and cannot be powered by fuel brought to the building. The building can contribute excess energy to the grid and, when necessary, access an equivalent amount, but no more."
• Passivhaus Windows | GreenBuildingAdvisor.com – I've been slightly obsessed with window u-values recently. This article has a great overview of German vs. US calculations differences and some good suppliers for windows from Canada: "When I interviewed Dr. Wolfgang Feist in 2007, he told me, “The reason for the number which we now use in Europe is the comfort of the occupants. It is a functional definition. During the winter, the coldest surface temperature in the room will be the window. If you don’t have a radiator in your room, the difference between the surface temperature of the window and the mean surface temperature of the room should not be more than 3 degrees Celsius; that’s for comfort reasons.”
  The colder the climate, the more important it is to use U-0.14 or better windows in a Passivhaus building — and not just for comfort. Low U-factor windows are necessary to meet the Passivhaus maximum annual heating energy standard of 15 kWh per square meter."

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These are my links for July 14th through July 16th:

• Sustainable Homes – This could open the doors for more LA's to impose CSH (and BREEAM?) levels for planning conditions: "Chelmsford Borough Council requires that Code for Sustainable Homes Level 3 is achieved as a planning condition for new buildings. The developer appealed against this condition but following consideration by the Planning Inspectorate the condition was held as "reasonable and necessary"."
• House 2.0: On triple glazing – Mark Brinkley warming to the idea of Passivhaus: "comfort underlies the PassivHaus take on triple glazing. I have been a voice arguing that triple glazing is “overkill” in the UK climate and that the energy used in making these units would probably never be repaid by the energy saved over their lifetime. However, the main reason for using triple glazing is not to save energy but to provide more comfort, as the internal temperatures remain more even.
  Feist produced a table showing what the temperature differences were close to different forms of glazing when the internal temperature is designed to maintain at around 21°C and the external temperature drops to —5°C.
  • next to a single glazed window, the adjacent temperature is around 1°C
  • next to a double glazed window (2000 vintage), the adjacent temperature is around 11°C
  • next to a triple glazed window, with a centre pane U value of just 0.65, the temperature is 18°C."
• Portland Architecture: A man struggling: Guy Battle comes to Portland – Guy stands up for engineers: "Do engineers deserve more credit?
  Yes, I think so. Engineering is the hidden hand. They have an enormous amount to contribute to architecture, but too often their contribution is gently put to one side. I think it’s something that should be celebrated. You look at someone like Peter Rice or Neil Thomas, Chris Wise, Guy Nordenson, and a host of other fantastic engineers, and they don’t really get the recognition they deserve."
• Ashden Awards (Jonathon Porritt) – Kirklees (again): "Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council – one of the unsung heroes of local government who have been doing their "sustainability bit" for the last 20 years. But their current home insulation initiative has really made people sit up and listen as it has succeeded in achieving real scale – where so many of the current measures are just picking around at the edges. Here’s what the Award citation said:
  "In 2007, Kirklees Council committed £10 million to providing free loft and cavity-wall insulation for every home in the borough where it can be used. The scheme targets one council ward at a time, using the local Councillor and local advertising, then individual home visits by assessors. By May 2009, 66,000 out of the 172,000 households in the borough had been assessed, 54,000 referred for surveys, 26,000 surveys had been completed, and 21,000 had insulation installed. This avoids an estimated 18,000 tonnes a year of CO2. 140 jobs have been created by the scheme.""
• Cutting carbon with smart finance | Forum For The Future – Innovative financing examples: "For instance, Kirklees’ Re-Charge scheme loans householders money to install low-carbon technologies in their property, such as solar panels to heat water. It is successful because there are no interest charges and the money does not have to be repaid until the property is sold. The council only has to subsidise the interest on the loans and this costs around three times less per home than using a grant scheme."
• FT.com / Weekend columnists / Tim Harford – Carbon footprinting: time to pick up the pace – The ever lucid Tim Harford:"The carbon-footprinting process often produces surprises. An environmentally conscious consumer in the crisps aisle of the supermarket will probably be thinking about packaging or “food miles”. The Carbon Trust reckons that about 1 per cent of the climate impact of a packet of crisps is from moving potatoes around. The largest single culprit is the production of the nitrogen fertiliser, and half of the climate impact in general takes place at the agricultural stage. The point is not that agriculture is always the problem, but that it is very hard for a well-meaning consumer to work out what the green purchasing decision actually is. For this reason, the Carbon Trust has a carbon labelling scheme. The trouble is that many consumers simply do not care enough to pay more or choose a less enjoyable product simply because of the low carbon label."
• Ground Control | PD Smith | Kafka’s mouse – Minton's book duly added to my wishlist. Review: "Sections of our city centres are being sold off to private developers to create shopping monocultures such as Westfield London or "malls without walls" like Stratford City, which is being built for the 2012 Olympics and is one of the largest retail-led developments in Europe. It is, says Minton, "a private city within a city" and represents a return to the early 19th century when aristocrats owned great swathes of London, fortifying their estates of up-market housing with gates and private security forces.
  Now, “land and property which has been in public hands for 150 years or more is moving back into private hands”. Minton argues that today’s privatised city centres and gated communities are fostering "a new culture of authoritarianism and control"."
• Market Research Strategies – Excellent article on generating leads in a down turn market. Primarily aimed at US architects, but easily relatable to UK and engineers/consultants.

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These are my links for July 2nd through July 8th:

• Woobius Scribbles — Bottom-up collaboration in the construction industry – Excellent post on collaborative working by Woobius and the curse of email:"You know that feeling. You’ve just set up the best collaboration system ever. You have all the processes documented and approved. Everyone’s agreed to use the system. Things couldn’t be better. Then, the project kicks off and there comes that sinking feeling when you realise that everyone is bypassing your carefully tuned system.
  Everyone is sending emails instead."
• If zero carbon is the answer then just what was the question? « isite – Martin has an excellent rant and takes on Passivhaus amongst other issues pertaining to zero carbon: "Passivhaus is emerging as the aspirational darling or solution. But what is the true embodied energy of passivhaus, in particular the massive amounts of insulation, sheeting and duct tape? Passivhaus will reduce energy requirements and costs. Excellent. But I would love to see the payback time on the total and higher than normal embodied energies and waste."
• Tellytubby land: BedZed revisited – Building – Fantastic review of BedZed 7 years on. I was fully aware of the situation with the CHP, but less so with the allotments and car use issues. A long article, but very worthwhile reading.
• Climate change odds much worse than thought – MIT News Office – More doom, but presented in pretty roulette wheels. I ought to stop reading all this doom, but am strangely compelled to keep checking for confirming evidence. Behavioural economists, make of this what you will.: "The new research involved 400 runs of the model with each run using slight variations in input parameters, selected so that each run has about an equal probability of being correct based on present observations and knowledge. Other research groups have estimated the probabilities of various outcomes, based on variations in the physical response of the climate system itself. But the MIT model is the only one that interactively includes detailed treatment of possible changes in human activities as well – such as the degree of economic growth, with its associated energy use, in different countries."
• The orders figures and public spending fears point to industry chaos ahead – need it be so? (Brickonomics) – I'm in broad agreement with Brian on this:"What firms should be doing now is assessing what they are good at and what they are not good at, what makes them profit, what costs them time and resources unprofitably.
  They should focus on quality of earnings not volume of earnings.
  They should focus effort on what they are good at and judiciously shed the operations that are weak….
  That however does not alter the reality that this recession will be cruel and that the industry has no choice but to retreat. Turnover overall must fall. Competition does need to be taken out of the market.
  It is better that firms recognise their weaknesses and retreat from them than seek to bid unrealistically against those better placed.
  The worst of all outcomes would be to lose good firms because of the woeful bidding by weak operations desperate to win work at any price."
• We don’t know what is coming next – so get ready – The Regeneration Blog – Jackie's advice on getting ready for a potential change in administration: "But in the meantime, my current advice is this: you know not what is coming next, so get as ready as you can. Have a total clear out (in every sense), trim down, strip back everything and establish your priorities.
  Swot up on localism and reconnect with your bottom-up roots. If you are able to deliver decent outputs (notably jobs or homes) you will be safe even if – or perhaps especially if – as we suspect, the RDA's get wiped away and their responsibilities are given to County Councils and the like. "
• Sustainable Design Tools Exhibited at AIA 2009: AECbytes Feature Article – Excellent review of the latest 'sustainable design' software tools available on the market, including Ecotect (aligned with Autodesk and therefore AutoCAD – very popular with architects), IES (my favourite) and TAS and Hevacomp (which are now both owned by Bentley (the home of AutoCAD rival Microstation). Whatever happened to Cymap? Seem to have been left behind…
• PlanningBlog: When did everyone get so cynical? « – "Regeneration is quite often seen as big business riding roughshod over local people’s wishes. It’s eyed with suspicion and written off as ‘ a waste of taxpayers money’ before it’s even come out of the ground.
  This all ties in with the wider anti-politician backlash currently sweeping the country. Politicians and anyone in authority are seen as ‘out to line their own pockets’ and anything they propose or champion is therefore, by association, a bad thing.
  Of course we should question authority and challenge things we don’t agree with but whatever happened to taking something at face value? A much needed regeneration of an area might actually be just that, not a conspiracy or an attempt to get one over on the general public.
  I’m not sure what the answer is to this. … Perhaps the problem is with the politicians themselves and only political reform can ‘reconnect’ and re-build trust between the people and those in authority."
• Government ends energy bulbs scheme – The IET – Some sensible news: "Power companies will no longer be able to mail out millions of energy-saving light bulbs to meet their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions from homes.
  The Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has announced changes to the Government scheme requiring energy suppliers to cut emissions from homes, including an end to the direct mail out of low-energy light bulbs by January 1, 2010."

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