ZERO-CARBON ECO-RENOVATION

Approximately 25% of UK emissions of CO₂ are from space heating, water heating and cooking in places people live (see Twenty-five million whole-house makeovers will match the Government’s global warming goals). One of the quickest and cheapest ways to cut UK emissions of CO₂ is to cut emissions from these sources. The greening of electricity supplies is also important but is probably best treated as a separate issue.

It has been suggested that much of the UK housing stock is beyond redemption and that it should be demolished and replaced (see Call to demolish polluting homes). We believe that the main alternative policy, 'eco-renovation', has not been properly explored and that wholesale demolition and rebuilding has several disadvantages:

• The practical difficulties of replacing enough of the UK's housing stock quickly enough to make a significant impact on CO₂ emissions.
• High costs.
• Loss of the 'embodied energy' of existing buildings.
• Social disruption: demolition of houses may also demolish the social structures that have grown up around them.
• Loss of heritage.

Given the use of high levels of insulation, ventilation via heat exchangers, and some other techniques, it is feasible to create housing with zero net emissions of CO₂ (see Passive House Institute and PassivHausUK). Clearly, this is easier to do with a newly-built house but we believe it is possible to go a long way down this road by upgrading existing buildings.

Some attempts have been made or are being made to go in that direction:

• From Greenhouse to Green House (this site)
• Nottingham Ecohome
• The Yellow House
• Alternative-Energy.co.uk
• Beacon Energy
• Alternative Technology at Home
• Flagship Home
• BRE Victorian House of the Future
• Walsall Ecohouse

but we believe much more needs to be done to explore what is feasible to do, to develop new techniques, to see what snags there may be and to assess the costs of different options.

Demonstrators

In particular, we see the need for several 'demonstrators'. Each of these would be an 'ordinary' home of a particular kind (Victorian terrace house, '60s bungalow, flat in a tower block, etc) and each one would be upgraded as far as possible towards the goal of achieving zero net emissions of CO₂. There might still be a need for a small amount of heating but, if this was provided from some 'green' source (such as bio-fuels or ground-source heat pump run on green electricity) then it should be possible to achieve zero net emissions of CO₂.

A competition

One way to raise awareness of these issues and drive things forward would be to organise a competition, open to anyone with an 'ordinary' house or flat:

• This would be relatively easy and cheap to organise and could generate a lot of publicity.
• The challenge would be to reduce CO₂ emissions to as near zero as possible. For any particular category of home (Victorian terrace house, '60s bungalow etc) the winner would be the home that comes nearest to achieving zero CO₂ emissions. If there was more than one that achieved zero net emissions, then the winner would be whoever had done the job at lowest cost.
• Prizes as small as £1000 could be enough to motivate people. The main motive would be meeting the challenge and the kudos of winning.
• It would be best if the competition were run by some such organisation as Friends of the Earth since the media are likely to pay attention to what they do.
• The competition would be very useful publicity for the organisation itself and could bring in many new members.
• The competition would help to highlight what the Government needs to do to encourage zero-carbon eco-renovation of UK homes on a large-scale.
• The competition could be the subject of a TV programme or series of programmes along similar lines to our proposal for a TV series about zero-carbon eco-renovation.

Links:

• Parity Projects

Last updated: 2006-11-11 (ISO 8601)