The UK house building regulations have been such a disappointment for so many years when it comes to energy efficiency. They have been written with that classic British trait of pandering to the lowest common denominator so as to make house building as cheap as possible. We purchasers then have the ‘choice’ (should that be expense?) to improve things should we have the financial resources and inclination.
The trouble with this approach is that we just rob Peter to pay Paul, and that happens twice. Because the general state of the housing stock in the UK is desperately poor in terms of its energy efficiency, we consume vast amounts of energy heating these spaces, energy that is getting more expensive by the day. Not only that, but there will be the (inflated) costs of improving the energy efficiency of the old stock. Now I don’t have any figures to hand, but if someone can point me to good sources of information I’d be very grateful.
passivehouse.co.uk – Home: “A passive house is a building in which a comfortable interior climate can be maintained without active heating and cooling systems (Adamson 1987 and Feist 1988). The house heats and cools itself, hence ‘passive’. “
It seems to me that we should be mandating much higher energy efficiencies. If you build to the levels that Stephen & Oksana Cartwight are using in their house in Wales (link above), then essentially nature is taking care of keeping you warm in the winter and cool in the summer and you can devote your attention to reducing your electricity consumption as much as possible. I feel it is perverse to look for cleaner ways of generating electricity without reducing consumption as far as we can first.
There will be those who take against mandated standards because they wish to preserve ‘choice’ or they would rather the house building industry policed itself. I feel this would be a mistake for the following reasons. The financial pressures on builders to maximise profitability would exert such a pressure on house design that standards would rise at the pace of the slowest mass market builder. Secondly, economies of scale need to be there to make this work. If everyone had to build to ‘passive’ standards then we are all, builders and buyers, in the same boat. Builders would have a ‘level playing field’, to abuse a metaphor, and material costs would be spread across a much larger number of houses reducing the unit cost. I’m sure there would be opportunities here for UK businesses in the supply side of all of this too.
Finally, energy generation. We urgently need to move to a situation where micro-power generation is a reality. It should be mandatory for all new builds and readily available to retrofit to existing (improved) housing stock. There really does need to be some courage, imagination and initiative shown by our politicians, otherwise we are all going to have a pretty expensive and bleak future.
