Elemental

These are my links for July 23rd through July 27th:

• 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.”

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These are my links for June 29th through July 1st:

• Gentrification and Its Discontents – Magazine – The Atlantic – "Zukin declares that she “resent[s] everything Starbucks represents,” which really means that her urban ideal is the cool neighborhood at the moment before the first Starbucks moves in, an ever-more-fleeting moment. Indeed, what has changed since Jacobs’s day—and the reason, as these books attest, that gentrification has become so intense an issue—is the speed of the transition of districts from quasi dereliction to artsy to urban shopping mall. This acceleration results from the ways consumption has become the dominant means of self-expression (Zukin is perceptive on this point) and from—relatedly, ultimately—the acceleration of the global economy."
• CIBSE CHP Group Seminar – Great overview of CHP: "To determine the appropriate size of a CHP system, there are several approaches that can be taken. The base load heat demand could be the benchmark for selecting a unit so that all the heat produced is used. Alternatively, the system can be sized based on the electrical base load without regard to the heat demand. In either case, it is possible that there is a more optimal size than will meet just the base load. Therefore, an in-depth analysis of daily or hourly loads is necessary for correct sizing. It is also important that the true base load energy demand is determined before sizing a CHP system. This means that energy efficiency measures should be implemented first to reduce energy demand and thus reduce the size of CHP system required."
• Interview: Michael Pollan | Life and style | The Guardian – I'm a massive fan of Pollan – great interview: "Big Food as it exists today is, patently, not sustainable. Two shocking statistics: before 1950, every calorie of fossil fuel energy expended on food production resulted in 2.3 calories of food; these days it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of your edible foodlike substance."
• Urban farms: can you source a complete meal from inside the M25? | Life and style | The Observer – Good to see Rosie is grounded in reality – urban food will never feed London entirely: "Nobody knows exactly how many farms there are in London. In a report, I read that there are 500 but I find it hard to believe. "I find that a bit hard to believe, too," says Rosie Boycott. "I haven't found that many. But they are there. Obviously it's barking to suggest London is ever going to be able to feed itself but there are things we can do to help small producers come to market. And of course a lot of it is about education.""
• Taxing carbon: Worth a go | The Economist – Perhaps not the panacea we hope for, but good to see someone is crunching the numbers: "A carbon tax has many more general advantages as a fiscal tool, too. It would be simpler and more predictable than the current jumble of tax breaks, trading schemes and purchasing obligations. The principle—that polluters pay for the damage they cause—is easily grasped, and it is politically attractive to tax “bads” such as pollution instead of “goods” such as work and entrepreneurship. And, by establishing a reliable price for carbon, it could give businessmen the certainty they need to invest in greener technologies. But the effect of that is likely to show up only after 2020."
• New Statesman – No hands to the pump! – The problem with ASHP: "But there's a problem. According to the Energy Saving Trust, carbon emissions are not actually reduced if air-source heat pumps replace gas or oil boilers, but only existing electric heating and coal-fired systems. Ground-source heat pumps are only slightly better. Yet the proposed guidelines do not specify where heat pumps should be installed to qualify for the subsidy. So the danger is that thousands of heat pumps will be drawing a subsidy of more than £1,000 a year, while delivering no emissions benefit."
• Construction Manager – Features – Great article on SKA: "According to Hall, the scheme could address several gaps in the market. “It suits smaller projects, and it’ll help tenants who aspire to a green fit-out but who might have taken space in a building that doesn’t have BREEAM excellent or very good. And I’d say our project managers have found it easier to get to grips with Ska compared to BREEAM.”<br />
  Ska has been developed to capture data from the smallest interior refresh to major refurbishments, judging their sustainability criteria in isolation from the building they sit in. The system is designed to be user friendly, based on a free online tool that helps to guide early design decisions. The project team can then make headway on cutting carbon without calling in a specialist consultant. “The guidance is exceptionally intuitive, so no one’s sitting around saying ‘where’s our BREEAM assessor when we need him’,” says Skansen director James Pack."
• Five Myths About Sustainability – BusinessWeek – Good common sense: "LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) is a rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to provide guidelines for, and certification of, sustainable buildings. There are many highly sustainable buildings that are not LEED-certified; it's not a requirement for being green.<br />
  If an organization won't benefit from LEED certification, we don't recommend it. It's costly and time-consuming so there has to be a business value to get the plaque on the wall. There are times when a project is highly sustainable, but pursuing LEED certification is not the right business decision."
• Paul Miller » Whole Earth Discipline – Book duly added to wishlist: "Stewart Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline is one of the best books I’ve read in the last few years, partly because it’s very well written and researched but mainly because it made me change my mind about some important issues.<br />
  Perhaps the easiest argument for me to accept (although I still learned a great deal) was the section on cities. It’s always made sense to me that cities are more efficient use of resources and are the driving force behind new ideas and problem solving. I’m a pretty big believer that new things happen when you bring people together who have different skills and experiences. You can either design those situations – as things like the Manhattan Project show – or you can just sit and watch as it happens in cities – the more cosmopolitan and connected the better. Of course, as cities grow they develop new problems, but they solve them just as quickly as they produce them."
• Government prepares 2050 low-carbon master plan – 25 Jun 2010 – BusinessGreen.com – "The report is expected to argue that the UK will need to electrify much of its infrastructure if it is to have any chance of meeting the 2050 carbon targets.<br />
  "An 80 per cent target means that realistically we need to electrify large sections of transport and heating," said the government spokesman. "That means that while overall energy demand may fall, demand for electricity could double by 2050. All the big investment challenges we face relate to that change.""
• Sustainability: World’s Most Sustainable Building – Not sure about 'most' sustainable, but it does look striking: "the Wuhan New Energy Center boasts to have a zero carbon footprint. The lily shaped building generates its own energy thanks to the vertical axis windmill and solar chimney. The building also harvests rain water within the building. The roof of the building is basically a solar panel array for generating electricity. The design allows the building to be cooled naturally. Designed by the design consultants Grontmij and Soeters Van Eldonk Architects the building will eventually stand 140 feet tall."
• Target Zero | School Guidance Report Summary – Interesting report – particularly interested on the NPV work: "The maximum on-site derived operational carbon emission reductions of 119% of regulated emissions (against a target of 124% for true zero carbon performance), can only be achieved using a package of energy efficiency measures, a 50kW wind turbine, 1300 m&sup2; photovoltaics, biomass boiler and 216 m&sup2; solar thermal panels. These measures incur an increased capital cost of 11.5%, which have a positive 25-year net present value (NPV).<br />
  To achieve economic true zero carbon performance requires the integration of off-site LZC technologies such as tapping into a district CHP plant"

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These are my links for April 21st from 16:49 to 17:46:

• Bring back Victorian values | Architecture | Art and design | The Observer – "A generation of young architects has grown up and been given the opportunity to prove their worth. British architecture was stagnant in the early 90s and now it's not, for which some of the credit is due to Labour.<br />
  …Many of the new schools and hospitals are at best very ordinary, at worst soul-destroying. Their problem, as in other fields, has been the New Labour belief that you could hand over the delivery of social benefits to the private sector.<br />
  In the planning of office blocks and blocks of flats, and in the building of schools and offices, the same thing happens. Worthy public aims are stated. Ambitious targets are set. The private sector is entrusted with achieving the aims and targets which, as it will, put its own interests first. So the worthy aims are compromised."
• Straw houses: I’ll huff and I’ll puff… | The Economist – "California, of course, is already thoroughly earthquake-proofed. But straw buildings of this sort might do well in seismically active places that are less wealthy. Spurred by the earthquake that devastated Pakistan in 2005, Darcey Donovan, a structural engineer from Truckee, California, set up a not-for-profit straw-bale-construction operation that has since built 17 houses there. She has been designing straw-bale houses in California for ten years and lives in one that she and her husband built in 2007. It has two stories, three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a two-car garage…<br />
  As Mr Eisenberg observes, “the lesson of the Three Little Pigs isn’t to avoid straw. It’s that you don’t let a pig build your house.” "

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These are my links for April 7th through April 8th:

• Bleak and tortured: Kapoor’s Orbit is hardly an Olympic ideal | Building Blog – “the fact that Kapoor’s works seems to have garnered criticism from critics and the public alike renders it, in this regard at least, unique.
  what does it say?
  And this perhaps is Orbit’s biggest flaw and the reason why it has attracted such negative publicity. To the mayor of London and the London 2012 organising committee, who have been gushing profusely about the sculpture since it was unveiled, it clearly provides a big, pop-art symbol of the games that will doubtless look good on TV and divert attention away from the fact the London Olympic Park lacks much of the architectural ‘wow’ factor so clearly evident in Beijing.”
• Self Reliance Myth – Debunking some myths (read the whole post): “I hear people say they are growing 30%, 50%, even 70% of their own food. What they usually mean is that they are growing fruits and vegetables that make up some percentage of the total cost or weight—but not calories—of their food. Vegetables are high in wet weight, but low in calories. If you are growing 100% of your own vegetables, they provide about 15-20% of your daily calories, unless you are living mostly on potatoes or other starchy veggies. Most daily calories come from grains, meat, or dairy products. So if you’re not raising large-scale grains or animals, it’s unlikely that you are growing more than one-quarter of your own food, measured honestly by nutritional content. In that case, it’s not accurate to claim you are “70% food self sufficient.” …. Now we begin to see how difficult, and even undesirable, self sufficiency is. You won’t have time for much else if you are truly food self sufficient, even in a permaculture system.”
• IES » » In Practice: linking Revit to IES – “it is important to note that gbXML is not perfect and limitations transferring information between BIM and energy simulation software still exist. A key issue to understand, when looking to cycle through design options in a timely manner, is that there are some fundamental differences between an energy model for analysis and an architectural model used to generate construction documents. For example, many BIM elements do not support information exchange identifying the thermal performance characteristics that are needed to run energy analysis. …
  At early stages, if you take the perspective of the energy modeler they want to include the minimum amount of information to answer the question at hand, to reduce the variables and the analysis time. If you take the perspective of the architect, the visual character of the overall model is important to convey the design intent, as well as the details to express the layering of the idea(s).”
• marklynas.org | Why no party can afford to be anti-nuclear – “By attempting to be populist but appearing merely outdated, the Lib Dems have produced an energy policy that is by far the least realistic of the plans by the three major parties. On 19 March, the Conservatives launched a sensible plan for a carbon tax on electricity generation to encourage investment in both nuclear and renewable power. After years of dithering, Labour is now on track with its large-scale offshore wind programme, nuclear new-build and major grid upscaling.
  The Lib Dems are left with wishful thinking. The writer David MacKay summarised their approach in his book Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air as “Plan L”, which would leave a zero-carbon Britain dependent on imports for two-thirds of its electricity, and on coal for much of the rest. (This is “clean coal”—a technology yet to be invented on the required scale.)”
• House 2.0: Part G and the Water Calculator – Comment from Nick Grant on Mark’s Part G post: “The calculator approach is inherently flawed (on many levels) but cannot easily be dropped as it was voted on by ‘Stakeholders’ and became policy. There is a critique on my website which led to a review for CLG. Unfortunately the report of the review has not been published as I would rather reference that.
  Many of us find it really draining to have to put so much effort into debunking seriously flawed policies as you regularly flag up on your blog. We would rather get on with designing more sustainable buildings (and renovations) but have to spend huge amounts of time and effort (usually unpaid) arguing against supposedly green policies that are making things worse.”
• Awash in Awareness: Knowing a Product’s “Water Footprint” May Help Consumers Conserve H2O: Scientific American – “Concerns over greenhouse gas emissions have vaulted the term “carbon footprint” into mainstream vernacular. Now, by promoting the concept of a “water footprint” with the goal of including it on product labels, researchers are hoping to draw similar attention to how drastically we’re draining our most precious resource. As the use of a footprint to gauge water use gains popularity, however, researchers are struggling to reach a consensus on how best to measure that footprint so the public understands its full impact.”
• Urban Resilience § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM – Fascinating article on resilience: “From a systems standpoint, what cities are doing is creating a network—which in itself could strengthen resilience. Knowledge generated in one place could be used in another, and experiences and best practices could be shared. But this power shift raises an interesting governance question, as every organization in place today when it comes to global governance—the CBD, the United Nations, the Law of the Sea—is based on the nation state. Now on the sidelines, a very powerful network of cities is growing, sharing information technology, and driving an ambitious sustainability agenda.”

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These are my links for July 26th through July 27th:

• International Green Construction Code (IGCC) Now in the Works| News | Architectural Record – International in the same way the World Series is a global baseball competition: "On June 29, the American Institute of Architects, along with the International Code Council (ICC) and the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), announced their intent to create an International Green Construction Code (IGCC).
  The new code aims to cover all aspects of sustainability in the built environment, from roofing to ventilation strategies, drawing from existing codes and standards to create one universal code. The code will apply to new construction and renovations. “We hope this will bring all of the separate efforts together and put them under one umbrella to make it easier for jurisdictions to know what they are adopting,” says Adolf Zubia, ICC board president."
• CBI climate change progress tracker. CBI on climate change. – Climate change remains one of the most critical issues affecting the UK, but in tough economic times it is at clear risk of slipping down the political agenda. Urgent action to cut emissions must be delivered if we are to hit government emissions reduction targets, ensure a future independent supply of energy, and manage rising energy costs.
  The CBI’s Climate Change Tracker is a tool developed by the CBI to track progress against the priorities set out in the CBI’s 2007 climate change report, Climate change: everyone’s business.
  The Tracker benchmarks the progress of the priorities for action set out in the report, focusing on the immediate decisions and delivery needed up to 2010.
• Dubai development may be down, but it’s not out – Los Angeles Times – Fascinating and scary article on Dubai: "In the heart of most cities, the biggest piece of land that a single developer is typically able to control is one square block. …In Dubai, whole districts of the city, many covering dozens of square blocks and hundreds of acres, have been given over to single developments. Seeing architectural diversity within any project as a threat to the bottom line, their creators usually hire a single firm to design them around a recognizable theme…
  The result is a surprising twist on the privatization of cities like Los Angeles, where public space is notoriously scarce. In the privatized city, as the well-known critique goes, people aren't forced to mix with people who are different from themselves. They are hidden from that interaction inside their private cars and gated developments. … In Dubai, remarkably enough, the same is true for buildings, which tend to cluster together with other pieces of architecture just like them."
• Property’s Quangocracy – Property Week – Excellent dissection of the RDA's and their spending. MIPIM anyone?
• Charter of the New Urbanism | Congress for the New Urbanism – My Jane Jacobs obsession has lead me to the doors of New Urbanism and their charter. With LEED-ND and BREEAM Communities rearing their heads, time to get to grips with New Urbanism and what the future holds…
• Frank Gruber: New Urbanism: Very Misunderstood – "New Urbanism, although it has antecedents in mid-century voices (such as that of Jane Jacobs) …is a movement that arose in the 1980s among architects upset not only with the decline of the quality of the built environment but also with the failure they perceived of the profession of architecture to pay attention to the spaces between buildings and the larger urban or regional context…
  New Urbanists are attacked from both sides of America's cultural divide. Chances are, if you mention New Urbanism to group of forward thinking, contemporary design professionals, whether architects or planners, they will roll their eyes. To them New Urbanism, …is a facilitator of sprawl, not a solution. …New Urbanism is hopelessly nostalgic.
  But if you find yourself among a group of conservatives or libertarians, … you'll just as likely unleash a denunciation on the grounds that New Urbanism aims to thwart the natural desire of Americans to live in a single-family house on a cul-de-sac."
• Media library · Town and Country Planning Association – "Leading planning and housing charity, the Town and Country Planning Association(TCPA) will celebrate its 110th AGM today by publishing a Manifesto for the 21st Century. The Association’s vision – Towns and Countryside for a New Age of Challenge – sets out a new set of aspirations which directly address today’s challenges of climate change, globalisation and social justice.
  The TCPA’s Manifesto comprises four main elements: choice and diversity; cities and the larger task; a revitalised countryside; and networks of cities, towns and villages."
• The Effect of the Recession on Partnering in the Construction Sector – Excellent presentation from Don Ward, which he presented at the AEC networking meeting at the Building Centre last week. Slides 31/32 hold key messages for me. A lower price for the client does not necessarily have to eat into our profit margins (and in fact, shouldn't – we all need to make money).
• Real Time Carbon – I love this – I have a great deal of time for anything coming out of AMEE : "Until now, anyone trying to understand the carbon impact of the electricity they use has only had a single static Government conversion factor. The factor – currently 527 grams CO2 per kWh of electricity – is updated only a few times a year.
  The standard figure is based on a number of assumptions about the mix of energy used to generate electricity – the "generation mix". It tells consumers nothing about the carbon intensity of electricity at a given time.
  Real Time Carbon wants to help energy users see the real-time carbon intensity of electricity so they can avoid consuming at times of high emissions. We look forward to a time when appliances, buildings and factories automatically manage demand according to the carbon being released."
• Our Seven Commitments – Royal Town Planning Institute – Interesting work from RTPI, but it feels a little late? Interested to find out how they do with no.1, behavioural change, and good to see it isn't a "cast-in-stone" mainfesto : "The seven commitments are supported by a living and continuously improved action plan that will deliver practical outcomes, benefiting communities at the global and the local scale."
• U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu: “Global Warming Is the Greatest Challenge Facing Science” « The Dirt – "In the case of energy-efficient buildings, Chu argued local knowledge drives local building development, and needs to be updated to ensure best practices in energy-efficient buildings quickly go global. ”Buildings are local. We don’t ship buildings to Denmark.” He described the type of knowledge needed for creating energy-efficient buildings as a sort of “hands-on,” practitioner’s knowledge –”it’s like a gardener’s craft or like those who know how to cook well.” Still, he thinks it is possible to “teach each other how to capture carbon, how to create more energy-efficient buildings.” To those who argue that any intellectual property (IP) transferred overseas should be protected, Chu added “it’s not about intellectual property (IP), it’s about people.” He also argued that the case for energy efficient buildings is economic — highly energy-efficient buildings can reduce current energy consumption by four-to-five times, putting “more money into people’s pockets.”"
• Ch 13 Page 79: Sustainable Energy – without the hot air – From David MacKay's excellent book:"“it’s better to drive than to walk.” Whether this is true depends on your diet. It’s certainly possible to find food whose fossil-fuel energy footprint is bigger than the energy delivered to the human. … According to a study from the University of Exeter, the typical diet has an embodied energy of roughly 6 kWh per kWh eaten. To figure out whether driving a car or walking uses less energy, we need to know the transport efficiency of each mode. For the typical car …, the energy cost was 80 kWh per 100 km. Walking uses a net energy of 3.6 kWh per 100 km – 22 times less. So if you live entirely on food whose footprint is greater than 22 kWh per kWh then, yes, the energy cost of getting you from A to B in a fossil-fuel-powered vehicle is less than if you go under your own steam. But if you have a typical diet (6 kWh per kWh) then “it’s better to drive than to walk” is a myth. Walking uses one quarter as much energy."
• DOE: Building Energy Codes – News Item – "The decision to create the joint publication resulted from the recent legislation passed by the U.S. Congress, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). The Act establishes an energy efficiency goal of 90 percent compliance with the 2009 IECC and Standard 90.1-2007 in all 50 states by 2017. In establishing this goal, the Federal legislation recognizes the 2009 IECC and Standard 90.1-2007 as the energy efficiency benchmarks for residential and commercial buildings.
  Because the ICC and ASHRAE documents complement each other, publishing them in one book benefits architects, designers, engineers, and code officials. It makes it easier to choose between design options, and helps make sure new and renovated buildings are in compliance with the latest references and local building safety codes."
• Bad British Architecture: BLAR MHOR HOUSING IN CAOL, FORT WILLIAM BY ARCHIAL FOR LORNE DEVELOPMENTS – Very quickly, a firm favourite on my blogroll. Ghost of Nairn in acerbic form as usual: "One helpful rule of thumb, from Nairn to you. When someone presents a masterplan with a perimeter of a line of trees, it means they're trying to hide something. Do not trust these people."

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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 March 11th through March 15th:

• The Building Futures Game – Building Futures – The Building Futures Game is the outcome of 3 years research and development work carried out by the Building Futures team, CABE and architectural practice AOC. The toolkit emerged through a shared desire as to how one might enable communities to think about the future of their neighbourhood, while providing stakeholders with an interactive and alternative way of consulting with a wide variety of groups on their concerns and aspirations.
• Disney Aims for Zero Carbon Emissions, Zero Waste in New Environmental Goals | GreenerBuildings – "The corporate responsibility report lays out seven long-term environmental goals for the company:
  • Zero waste.
  • Zero net direct greenhouse gas emissions from fuels.
  • Reduce indirect greenhouse gas emissions from electricity consumption.
  • Net positive impact on ecosystems.
  • Minimize water use.
  • Minimize product footprint.
  • Inform, empower and activate positive action for the environment"
• T-Zero – "T-ZERO is a free internet tool that provides independent sustainable refurbishment advice to users, with the option of linking directly to the suppliers, manufacturers, and installers of any measures you choose. It is designed for those refurbishing their own homes, homes they manage, or the homes of clients, taking you through a series of simple steps."
• How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air – TED 2009 « GreenSpaces Blog – More 'healthy' plants (I'm slightly obsessed with the original NASA study – spider plants are *good*). Mother in Law's tongue for bedroom, and Areca Palm for living room.
• Welcome to YouCanPlan – via Be2Camp and then EcoBuild: "Our idea is based on the concept of ‘enabled self procurement’ or ESP to help build new sustainable communities. ESP is a process where future residents of communities are supported as the developers of their own homes, combining the choice of self build with the efficiency of speculative development."
• Green for go: sustainability in the JCT contract – Building – "Following an industry-wide consultation, it published Building a Sustainable Future Together, a guidance note which is principally concerned with how sustainability in design and construction is provided for in contract documents. It also includes new contract clauses that extend those currently in JCT contracts, such as the Framework Agreement. The two principal new clauses are:
  1) The contractor is encouraged to suggest economically viable amendments to the employer's requirements which, if instructed as
  a variation, may result in improvement in environmental performance in the carrying out of the works or of the completed works
  2) The contractor shall provide to the employer all the information that he reasonably requests regarding the environmental impact of the supply and use of materials and goods which the contractor selects."
• A second look at solar power on roofspace « lightbucket – Lightbucket doesn't blog often, but when he (she?) does, they're worth reading.
  "Averaged over the year, rooftop PV can exactly match England’s electricity sales, but there is a huge seasonal variation. During the summer, PV output is higher than the full-year average, but electricity demand is lower, so PV can supply more than twice the total demand. The situation reverses in midwinter. In December, the month of lowest insolation, rooftop solar PV can meet only 20% of electricity demand. Additional capacity will be needed to meet winter demand. Energy storage technologies can smooth out variations in output over a 24-hour timecale, and maybe longer, but certainly not over 6 months.
  If we had solar photovoltaics on all roofspace in England, we could comfortably meet England’s summertime electricity use, but only a fifth of wintertime electricity use."
• Ten things to manage in a recession: 4 – executive costs « pwcom 2.0 – Paul illustrates Charles Handy's 'Hollywood' model perfectly: "… some AEC professionals have already opted to work as freelances or as independent consultants, undertaking a succession of contracts of their own choice instead of working for an employer. Particularly in the consultancy sector, just as small firms might combine with others with complementary skills and/or resources, so experienced individual professionals could combine with other independent practitioners to compete for work and then form part of the multi-disciplinary team appointed to undertake the project. …. Being formed of a group of independent ‘e-lances’ or ‘tech-nomads’, the operational overheads of such a multi-disciplinary consortium are also likely to be lower, making their services more cost-effective – an advantage likely to be underlined if the team also uses low-cost collaboration technology to manage and share its data."
• You are the weakest link, goodbye – Joan has a list of funny/tragic redundancy stories.
• cityofsound: Work and The City, Frank Duffy (2008) – Good review of Duffy's book: "In particular, Work and the City convincingly details how this has led to a grossly inefficient under-utilisation of resources with damaging effects on individuals, corporations, and almost all aspects of urban ecosystem."
• Sustainability Consulting: What is it, and am I qualified? Part I « Bright Green Talent Musings (www.brightgreentalent.com) – And I count myself amongst those who say sustainability is NOT a discipline: "As individuals from all kinds of backgrounds and industries push into the field of sustainability consulting, it can become murky as to what that work even entails. This is especially true when considering the different perspectives and methodologies that are employed and adding even more complexity is the variability among clients and their needs. Thus, this quote sums up for me what sustainability consultants are trying to do – they help businesses address and redress the way in which they operate so that they will be better positioned for the market of the future a la decreasing their negative impact on the natural environment. Some argue that like the trends of international business and e-commerce, sustainability will at some point cease to be its own discipline and assume its rightful place within all of business practices."
• » Perpetual beta SuDoBE — Sustainable Design of the Built Environment – Chris makes a great point: "What would happen if we treated buildings as being in perpetual beta state? How would this change things in the construction industry? Perhaps developers and the design team would make a long term commitment to upgrading the building in line with occupants’ (and others’) experiences after the building’s initial release.
  Of course buildings, like most artefacts are in perpetual beta. There are always ‘bugs’ to iron out and features that don’t work. Many of our new low and zero carbon buildings will fail either from the outset or a few months or years down the line. It would be a real step forward if we could admit that now and put in place the mechanisms that will allow us to decide whether they are working as intended, to fix them when they aren’t and to pass on what we have learned to Carbon 2.0. Would the industry allow us to do that? Do we need to ask?"
• Robinson Low Francis to slash staff pay 12.5% – Building – I'm sure this is just the same as cutting salaries by 20-40% – surely they'll just end up doing a similar amount of work, in fewer (probably longer) days (was my experience of working part-time, anyway): "At engineer Scott Wilson, some senior staff have agreed to work three- or four-day weeks, according to Jerome Monro-Lafon, its UK managing director."
• Survey confirms building control officers enforce regs – Building – "The LABC’s survey looked at 2000 projects to see how many potential contraventions would have occurred if a building control officer hadn’t stepped in and enforced the regulations. It found Part A attracted the most enforcement action with building control officers asking for remedial action in 18% of projects followed by Part L at just over 16% and Part B at just under 16%. Part G which deals with hygiene attracted enforcement action in just 1.5% of the surveyed projects."
• Natural lighting and sustainability | Sustainable Building Blog – Building Sustainable Design – "The tightening regulatory allowances placed on artificial lighting are already beginning to push the limits of what lighting technology can deliver. Our regulatory framework must not become unworkable or breed dull, unhealthy and uninteresting visual environments. The lighting community must steer regulation through better government lobbying, but we should not forget the place natural light has in avoiding the need for regulation in the first place."
• Pursuing the Elusive Goal Of a Carbon-Neutral Building by Richard Conniff: Yale Environment 360 – "But Kroon is also a reminder of what even some of the best hearts and minds in the sustainable design movement cannot yet achieve. For a “green premium” unofficially estimated at about 5.7 percent of construction cost, the Kroon design team managed to reduce projected energy use and emissions by 61 percent below the levels for a comparable building of conventional design. The biggest savings came not from sexy new technologies but from figuring out how to make the design function like an old-fashioned cathedral, with a slender profile for maximum daylighting, an east-west orientation for greater solar gain on the long southern exposure, careful use of shading, and plenty of stone and concrete to store thermal energy. A solar photovoltaic array and geothermal wells will supply much of the remaining energy load. “We got damned close to carbon neutral,” boasted a construction manager…"
• Sustainable Cities – The most useful output I've seen from CABE – sustainable cities website. A feast of information and examples: "This website gives expert advice on planning, designing and managing a sustainable place. It cuts through the complexity with clear priorities for action. And it shows which places are getting it right."
• Constructing Excellence in the Built Environment » Blog Archive » Reverting to type (by Don Ward) – Don Ward has a great post: "The industry loves lowest price tendering – it invented it, and back in 1963 codified it in the NJCC’s code of practice for single stage tendering. Large parts of the industry have since conspired with clients over the years to continue with lowest price tendering – it is easy, and it means you don’t have to work too hard to deliver on value. But let’s face it, it usually knowingly sets the project up to fail. It’s a bizarre process – as a questioner said at a conference the other day put on by the Universities of Reading, Loughbrough and Salford, construction must be the only industry that competes to deliver the same thing for the client rather than something different? And is it the only industry that thinks it’s clever to make its money by screwing the client and/or the supply chain?"

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