STOPPING UK ARCHITECTURAL SPEW

Buildings threaten UK emission targets, report says
20 January 2010 (BBC News)

"UK targets for cutting carbon emissions by 2050 will not be met without radical changes to the engineering of buildings, [according to Engineering a low carbon built environment]…

"The Royal Academy of Engineering report lays out a groundwork for reducing the environmental impact of new buildings as well as refurbishment of old ones…It added there was a serious skills gap in the sector that could grow worse...Current regulations hold that new homes should be "zero-carbon" by 2016, and all other new build should reach that target by 2020…[but] principles that could be applied to drastically reduce energy consumption are simply not being used…[M]any building principles, such as those that retain heat in a building or make good use of natural light, were known to the Romans but are still not being implemented..."

Lots of holes to plug. (click to enlarge)

"The field of "building engineering physics", which draws on old ideas and new, can address the issue. But the report warns that both the industry and academia are so far failing to produce engineers who can apply the concepts…

"…[T]he Sainsbury's in London's Greenwich [is] an example of the savings that such building approaches can provide…[I]t almost certainly cost significantly more to build than a less eco-friendly building…[but it saves] more than £400,000 a year in energy costs…[This sharply contrasts with] "eco-bling" - the tendency for many new building projects to fail to reduce their overall energy consumption and then tack on energy generation schemes such as wind turbines or solar panels in a high-visibility effort to make up for some of the wasted energy…"

The very definition of ambitious. (click to enlarge)

"The report stresses that the government should support detailed study into how to increase training in building physics…to ensure the new build projects and refurbishments bring environmental sustainability into line with planned targets…Because 80% of the buildings that will be occupied in 2050 have already been built, the problem lies more in refurbishments…[I]n order to reach targets, the rate of building refurbishment to a high sustainability standard must increase by a factor of four or five…

"[A] National Audit Office report on building works in 2008 and 2009…showed that 80% of projects undertaken by the government failed to meet its own standards of sustainability…[T]he authors said that targets should not be revised but rather that implementation of building physics, both in academia and on job sites, must be radically increased…[The key to change] could lie with the largest landowners in the UK, such as government and universities…"