MS Word macro for subscript/superscript formatting

Posted on by Jamie Bull

Mel Starrs has just posted a handy time-saving tip over at Elemental which explains how to use MS Word’s autocorrect feature to ensure that your CO2 subscript always comes out right. It’s a handy approach and saves your work from the annoying critic who ignores your carefully crafted argument while pointing out every last formatting error.

My contribution here is from the point of view of someone who edits quite a lot of other people’s reports as well as writing my own, in which case you can’t rely on the autocorrect method. Instead I hunted around on the net for a way of correcting it automatically using a macro. Eventually I found what I was looking for on G Mayor’s site . It needed a bit of adaptation to do exactly what I wanted but it’s now a real time saver. It covers:

  • m2
  • m3
  • R2
  • CO2
  • NO2
  • SO2
  • H2O

Just download and unzip the file from the link below, then import it to your Normal template in MS Word.

FormatFormulae.

To add the macro to the Normal template open up MS Word and press Alt-F11 to open the VBA editor window —>  Ctrl-R to show the project explorer (if it isn’t already showing) —> right click the Normal template —> Import file —> browse for the FormatFormulae.bas file —> Open, and you’re done.

It’s so handy that I also decided to add it to the Quick access bar for easy access (MS Word 2007 and 2010 only).

To add a button to the Quick Access Toolbar in MS Word 2010, first click on the down arrow at the right hand end of the row of icons that includes the Save icon, then select More commands —> Choose commands from —> Macros. Then find Normal.FormatFormulae.CommonFormulae in the list that appears and use the Add >> button to move it across to the Quick Access Toolbar.

Next you can add an icon so you can find it easily. I’ve hijacked the π symbol which normally serves as the insert formula button but you can add whatever makes sense to you. Just click Modify and select an icon from the options that appear.

If you’re confident messing about with VBA for Word, the code is commented to show you how to adapt it to cover any other subscript/superscript formulae that you use regularly.

A life cycle approach to refurbishment – Part 1

Posted on by Jamie Bull

To repeat that old statistic, the Sustainable Development Commission claim that in 2050, homes existing in 2006 will still make up 70% of the total housing stock. Although the non-domestic sector has a higher rate of demolition than the housing sector, today’s non-domestic buildings will also be in use for many years.

In 2009 the Committee on Climate Change assessed the UK’s potential carbon emissions reductions. They estimated that new homes could contribute 4 MtCO2 towards the target, while refurbishment of existing homes could contribute between 9 and 18 MtCO2. An additional saving of 5 to 9 MtCO2 was projected to be achievable from non-domestic buildings.

It’s not cheap to refurbish buildings to high levels of efficiency, and there’s no requirement to match new build performance. It is therefore worth considering whether the benefits of refurbishment are sufficient to offset the upfront costs, both environmental and financial.

This post is an introduction to life cycle thinking approaches used in the construction industry which can help to address this question.

Life cycle thinking in buildings

The impacts of a building can be split into impacts associated with waste and impacts associated with energy. The energy use can be both direct and indirect. Dixit et al define direct energy use is that used on site during construction, during pre-fabrication, and in transportation of materials to site. Indirect energy use is that used in producing building materials, maintaining the building, demolishing the building, and the operational energy used throughout the building’s life. The same distinction applies to material resources.

Life cycle cost

Life cycle thinking is not new to the building design community, as demonstrated by the large number of tools shown in the image above. Many construction projects will consider LCC at some point, partly encouraged by schemes like BREEAM which awards credits for demonstrating that the whole life cost of building elements was studied at the design stage.

The relevant standard for LCC of constructed assets is BS/ISO 15686-5.

Life cycle assessment

Although life cycle cost could be seen as a type of LCA, the term “life cycle assessment” is generally only applied to the assessment of environmental impacts as described in BS/ISO 14040.

There are several outstanding areas where the practice of LCA on buildings differs from other LCAs. A paper by Erlandsson and Borg in 2003 identified “service coverage, life-cycle definition, time dependence (coverage), life-cycle inventory and life-cycle impact assessment” as needing development.

Work has continued including several recent papers. A simple LCA tool called ENSLIC has also been published which is designed to fit with the work of CEN TC 350, a life cycle assessment standard which is currently under development.

Life cycle carbon footprint

Carbon footprinting is probably the best known and most discussed environmental LCA approach. In the UK the standard for life cycle carbon footprinting of products (with buildings seen as a particularly complicated type of product) is PAS 2050.

Several companies including dcarbon8 and Sturgis Carbon Profiling now carry out embodied carbon and life cycle carbon footprinting of buildings. There are a number of tools aimed specifically at built assets, such as the BRE’s Envest II which also covers LCC, and more in development, notably some of the successful applicants for Technology Strategy Board funding on the Design & Decision Tools for the Low Impact Buildings programme.

Whole life value

Whole life value (WLV) assessment is the comprehensive use of life cycle thinking. The costs and benefits to all stakeholders are weighed up in a process based on LCC (and subject to the same ISO standard). Non-market LCA impacts are accounted for by assigning financial values or by non-financial weighting methods (there could be a whole series of posts on the pros and cons of the different approaches to values and weightings).

The National Audit Office has recommended that this process should be followed for Government funded works. Although the term “whole life value” is not mentioned explicitly, the Treasury’s “Green Book” also advocates a similar process in examining the whole life costs and benefits to a range of stakeholders.

Summary

So that’s an overview of the types of tools available and a whole lot of further sources for the interested reader. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting more on methodological issues around applying life cycle thinking to buildings, particularly the difficulties connected with length of life of buildings.

 

Embodied carbon of insulation

Posted on by Jamie Bull

I commented on Chris Newman’s blog over at Parity Projects the other day, where Chris had suggested that embodied energy is not worth considering as (in energy saving kit) it would always pay back over the life of the installation. While this is true, and the way he shows it is quite nice, that doesn’t make the embodied impacts negligible. If you can achieve the same energy-saving service for lower embodied energy then that will improve your environmental payback.

Putting embodied energy aside and focusing on embodied carbon, what is the embodied carbon of insulation? And what else do we need to consider when specifying insulation?

Coincidentally, at work this week I’ve been updating some work I did in my MSc thesis which addressed this question. My thesis looked at loft insulation and produced a methodology for finding cost- and carbon-optimal points. At what point does adding an extra 10mm of material cost more (both financially and in carbon) than it will save?

This post looks at a slightly different question. Here we assume that the U value is fixed and the thickness of the wall is variable. Also at the moment we are only considering embodied carbon and not cost.

So what we are talking about is a functional unit of one m2 of wall with a given U value (of 0.15 W/m2K in this case). The boundary condition assumed is that the rest of the wall structure remains the same in all cases. You can consider it as an externally insulated solid wall construction with external cladding and an uninsulated U value of 1.25 W/m2K. Thermal bridging and the effects of framing required for non-rigid insulation are ignored for the time being.

The thickness required (first graph) is a function of the thermal conductivity of the insulating material. Some materials such as polyurethane (PUR) have conductivity as low as 0.23 W/mK, while most materials cluster in the mid-range at around 0.40 W/mK.

The data used for this assessment is drawn mainly from the Inventory of Carbon and Energy v2.0. There were a few gaps which had to be filled using information at GreenSpec.

The results of this (second graph) show a massive difference between the low embodied carbon materials and the high. And remember they are all saving the same amount of carbon over their lifespan as they are all based on achieving the same U value. This means that the carbon return on carbon invested (CROCI) of the glass fibre quilt will be 46 times higher than that of the unfaced PUR insulation. There are other things to consider here, not least cost, but we’ll come back to that.

First I want to look at sequestered carbon. Advocates of natural building materials will tell you all about the carbon that is locked up in natural building materials. In fact by weight timber is generally 50% carbon which means 500g of carbon sequestered per kg of wood. Converting that to carbon dioxide you get a figure of 1.83 kg of CO2 removed from the atmosphere for every kg of wood products used [1].

Now there is some debate as to how that sequestered carbon should be treated. Some say that the whole benefit should be given to the building product. Others say that as you can’t be sure what will happen at the end of the building’s life the credit shouldn’t be counted at all [2]. I’m going to sit on the fence on this for the time being and just show you the graph with the two figures on either side of the y axis (third graph).

As I said, there are other things to consider.

Cost: Generally natural insulation materials are more expensive than most other insulation materials.

Space: As we’ve seen, this depends on the conductivity. The big jump is for PUR-type insulation where the space saving is high. In places where space is at a premium, such as retrofitting internal insulation this can be a major factor in favour of using high embodied carbon insulation.

Structural properties: Some of the insulation products in the graphs above have structural properties that add to their value. The more rigid materials can have cladding hung from or fixed to them directly, avoiding the costs of framing and reducing thermal bridging.

So is it worth specifying natural insulation materials? Going back to the way I approached my thesis question (what are the optimal points for carbon and money when installing insulation?), including sequestered carbon would have suggested that the carbon-optimal U value is that of an infinitely thick wall! However the financial-optimal point would have been at a higher U value than for most non-natural materials.

If you can achieve the same performance in the same space for the same cost with the natural material, then the answer is simple. In optimisation theory the natural insulation would be a “dominant option”. But this won’t often be the case. More often there will be options which are better on some measures and worse on others meaning you have to trade off the value you place on things like capital cost, running cost, environmental impact and space.

There are few easy answers when it comes to questions with that many parameters. But now at least you have graphs to approach some of the question.

[1] This is calculated based on the molecular weight of Carbon (C) and Carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon atoms have atomic weight of 12. Oxygen atoms have an atomic weight of 16.

C + O + O ÷ C

= 12 + 16 + 16 ÷ 12

= 44 ÷ 12 = 3.67

So for every kg of carbon stored, 3.67 kg of carbon dioxide have been removed from the atmosphere.

[2] For example the wood could be burned to generate energy after it is removed from the building – in which case you need to estimate what the carbon footprint of the displaced fuel will be by the time the building is demolished. It could just rot, adding methane to the atmosphere. It could be made into compost and displace peat that might otherwise have been dug up.

Cradle-to-cradle

Posted on by Jamie Bull

I have just returned from a cradle-to-cradle conference at the University of Cambridge. In common with a lot of the people attending, I had heard the phrase and filed it in a mental box with other “cradle-to-something” phrases from the vocabulary of environmental impact assessments. Cradle-to-factory gate, cradle-to-site, cradle-to-grave are all a part of the vocabulary of life cycle assessment and embodied energy/carbon analysis.

So when I picked up a copy of Braungart and McDonough’s book last week to get up to speed and found that the title had misled me as to the contents it was quite a surprise. Cradle-to-cradle (or C2C), I found, is not so much an environmental assessment methodology as a set of design principles. And very ambitious design principles at that. This piece will have a look at some of the key principles as I have understood them, at how people at the conference were affected by and were applying the principles, and at how they could find more mainstream acceptance.

Efficiency is not enough

The first principle is there’s no point in being efficient if you’re being efficient at the wrong thing. To quote from the Braungart and McDonough book: “An efficient Nazi, for example, is a terrible thing”, cradle-to-cradle thinking advocates “eco-effectiveness” over eco-efficiency. As a staunch advocate of efficiency, this grated when I first saw it written down, but really it’s hard to argue with. The argument goes that a truly cradle-to-cradle building (or product, or society) must not just have smaller harmful impacts, but have no harmful impacts at all. “Being less bad is no good” as the catchy phrase has it.

The idea is that cradle-to-cradle buildings have to have positive impacts – to improve biodiversity, to sequester carbon dioxide, to improve the social fabric of their surroundings. The change in paradigm is from minimising negative impacts to maximising positive impacts. And in principle there’s no need to be efficient with your positive impacts.

A repeated phrase from the conference organisers and speakers was that up to now, precisely zero cradle-to-cradle-to-cradle buildings have been built. One of the biggest things I took away from this event is that creating a truly C2C building from start to finish is nigh-on impossible in the modern world. Everything we do has negative impacts, whether on a local scale or a global scale.

Waste is food

There is a strong eco-mimicry feel to the cradle-to-cradle philosophy. To illustrate the concept of closed loops the example of the cherry tree came up over and over again during the day. This was used mostly as an example of why waste is not a bad thing. A cherry tree can be seen as wasteful in that most of the fruit it produces does not go on to grow into a new cherry tree. But in ecology, the “waste” from one process becomes food for another process, or for the next loop of the same process. These loops are a fundamental part of cradle-to-cradle as might be expected. It’s the circle of life, to coin a phrase.

Taking a step away from ecology, cradle-to-cradle introduces the idea of technological loops. Here the waste from one technological product or process become the food for another – you’re probably picturing something like recycling plastic bottles. But in the techno-sphere recycling is frequently anything but a circle of life and more like a degrading orbit. The term used in cradle-to-cradle circles is downcycling, where the “recycled” product is less useful or less recyclable than the original product. The example that came up in conversation was of empty plastic bottles being shipped to china to be made into fleeces. What are the odds that that fleece won’t find its way back into a recycling bin and back to a recycling facility and be made in to another product?

Recycling, in cradle-to-cradle is recycling on steroids. To count as cradle-to-cradle, the product should be made of 100% reused, recycled or renewable materials. Everything should return to the ground as biological nutrients, or be reclaimed as a functional products at the end of their service life. There is no downcycling and nothing ever becomes waste, only a nutrient.

Celebrate diversity

There wasn’t a lot of discussion on this rule in practice or on how to apply it (beyond a fair few living roofs). However the array of buildings from various architects on display was certainly diverse, from low impact educational buildings like The Foundry, to much larger buildings like the Adnams warehouse.

I think the most diversity-celebrating and encouraging part about cradle-to-cradle is the simplicity of the “rules”. They are surely very hard to live and design within, but in the cracks between those restrictions hugely interesting things can sprout up. This again is the way nature works. The forces of evolution lead to things finding a way to eke out an existence and flourish in the most challenging of environments. Where there is waste, it will be turned into a nutrient – something will fill that niche.

One of the most exciting, and certainly the most enthusiastically delivered talks of the day (from RO&AD architects) contained a very interesting phrase: “Simplicity is compressed complexity”. I understood this to mean that when you put together a few simple rules or constraints then allow human ingenuity to go to work on them you can end up surrounded by staggering complexity and diversity. I’m hoping to write up one of their ideas here at some point so I won’t go into detail about their awesome idea for a particular building regulation reform. Suffice to say, a few small rules have the potential to play out into something much greater than the sum of their parts.

Responses to cradle-to-cradle

There were a number of completely commendable buildings discussed at the conference including the Adnams warehouse and The Foundry, both of which display cradle-to-cradle thinking in many of their aspects. But the truth is none of them could be considered sustainable from cradle-to-cradle for one reason or another. We often talk about something being more or less sustainable, but sustainable is an absolute word. Just as you can’t be more or less pregnant, you can’t be more or less sustainable. If we don’t eventually get it just right, all we’re doing is slowly grinding away the ecological and mineral resources that sustain us. That’s a scary thought.

So how is it that cradle-to-cradle has attracted a diverse range of incredibly positive and happy people? I think the root of it is that many have all but done away with the concept of sustainability equalling efficiency. Eco-effectiveness is the order of the day. My concern there was that under the cradle-to-cradle principles, things should have only positive impacts. No trade-offs allowed. No off-setting, no cost-benefit analysis, no WorthIt?. This didn’t seem to be the view of many of the conference attendees and presenters, with some notable exceptions.

And boy, am I thankful for that. We need a route from here to there, and in figuring out that route there certainly is a place for all those things – if only to buy us some more time.

How to measure cradle-to-cradle

So where do we go from here? As I was sat getting during the first session very excited about how on earth you might go about measuring cradle-to-cradle, Dr Peter Bonfield of the BRE was very obviously doing exactly the same thing. In fact he seemed so excited by what was obviously also a new idea to him that his talk later on was only tangentially connected to his slides (which were mainly about the 2012 Olympics development).

And to cap it all off, his speech ended with a sincere statement of aspiration to make the first cradle-to-cradle building in the world at the BRE innovation park, and to make it soon.

The way I see it, cradle-to-cradle is an aspiration. It is about continuous improvement. A phrase that came up (sorry, I don’t remember which talk) was know your chains, improve your chains, close your chains to make them into loops. This is very much like any other continuous improvement or quality process such as ISO 9000 or SixSigma.

Another way, based around the of LCA reporting is that a way of representing the results might be in some sort of a star rating with a set of areas in which impacts (both positive and negative) can be made. I was doodling away, inspired by Dr Matthew Hunt of Royal Haskoning’s green feet (not literally!), Peter Bonfield’s enthusiasm and a conversation with Brian Murphy of GreenSpec about the BRE’s materials rating scheme and came up with something like this.

It is inevitable that some things will come with both a benefit and a cost, but we only measure either the cost, or the net effect. Balancing them up is a natural human instinct. But we ought to see the cost as what it is. For one thing, the cost may not fall on the same people as those who accrue the benefit, and they cannot always be compensated. Not everything is as easily exchanged as money. It is important to have a way to bear this in mind, and I think keeping the negatives clearly visible is a good way of doing this.

Being almost totally new to cradle-to-cradle I can see it is a very exciting idea to come across and a lot has clearly been done to make it a coherent philosophy. There is going to have to be a lot of reconfiguring of how I think about measuring the desirability or otherwise of things over the next few years.

Peter Bonfield will be doing much the same. I think he will have got back to his office at BRE, picked up a copy of cradle-to-cradle, read a few pages and wiped his fevered brow at that impulsively delivered pledge to make the first cradle-to-cradle building in the world. As if greening the Olympic Games wasn’t a hard enough task for one man!

Here’s a toast to ambition and let’s hope he sees it through. He’s going to need an awful lot of help.

WorthIt? Low-energy bulbs

Posted on by Jamie Bull

Low-energy bulbs

Low-energy light bulbs split the nation down the middle. Half of us believe that these bulbs will save energy, bring down our energy bills, and reduce carbon emissions. The other half believe that there are all sorts of things that haven’t been considered, and that if we look at the whole picture then the traditional incandescent bulbs are actually better. I have a lot of sympathy with the second point of view. You really do have to look at the bigger picture to get the truth. Trouble is you actually have to look, not just raise a new talking point.

Low-energy bulbs take more energy to manufacture than incandescent bulbs.

Compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) are much more complicated than incandescent bulbs. Each CFL bulb contains phosphor, mercury vapour and a microchip (the ballast). This compared with a simple tungsten filament in an incandescent bulb. Of course it takes more energy to produce a CFL than a regular bulb.

In fact, it takes over 9 times as much energy. However CFLs last about 8 times as long as an incandescent bulb (around 8000 hours against around 1000 hours). That means that in the long run, the CLFs only come out slightly worse on embodied energy. This page (cached version as the site seems to be down) shows that it only takes 50 hours of operation for the CFL to save that additional energy.

Just as you shouldn’t only look at the operational energy, you shouldn’t only look at the embodied energy. Both will give you a distorted view. You need to look at the whole life costs – both the capital costs (although they’re fairly non-existent in this case) and the running costs, as well as the benefits or savings.

Incandescent light bulbs help to heat the house.

I came across this idea at the weekend in a letter to the Times science supplement, Eureka (I would link to the online version but it’s paywalled). It asked the question, “What about the heating you lose when you switch from an incandescent bulb to a low-energy one?” In essence this is suggesting that the wasted energy is not truly wasted, as it is useful as heat.

I’m glad I came across it as gives us a chance to explain one of the common misconceptions about electricity.

It’s actually a good question. All the wasted energy from an incandescent bulb does turn to heat. This means that if you assume that all the heat given off by the bulb is useful (which of course it isn’t – not on a warm summer night when you’re tucked up in bed reading for example) then there would in fact be a slight increase in energy use as measured at the meters. This is because the boiler will not be 100% efficient.

The big thing that this misses out is the fact that electricity has to be generated in a power station. No power station is 100% efficient – or even 60% efficient – so a large proportion of the energy in the fuel is lost as heat up the cooling towers.

This wasted energy is reflected in the relative costs of gas and electricity, with gas being about 1/3 of the price of electricity. Because of this, even though there may be a slight increase in units of energy used in the home, the overall energy bills will certainly go down. As is usually the case, saving money shows that when the whole system is considered, energy is also being saved.

To prove the point I ran some numbers on this and came up with the graphs below for the annual change. The numbers include costs of bulbs, cost of electricity and cost of heating.

Assumptions: Light bulbs is on 3.12 hours per day (13% of the time), the boiler in the house is 90% efficient and 75% of the heat from the bulbs is useful heat.

This set of graphs shows the big difference between the energy savings and the other two measures. This is because we are only looking at the energy saving as measured by the meter in the house. If we looked at the energy bills of the power station where the electricity is generated there would be a much closer match.

So are low-energy light bulbs worth it?

So now we have figures for the investment in low-energy bulbs, and for the savings from them, we can calculate some payback ratios.

I’ve not been able to find any figures for the embodied carbon of light bulbs so this analysis makes the assumption that there is a 2:1 split between gas and electricity used in the manufacturing process, and that the bulbs are all made in China with a carbon factor of electricity of around 0.9 kg CO2/kWh. If anyone knows of a better source than this guess, please let me know and I’ll be happy to update the analysis.

See this post for an explanation of what all these numbers mean.

The chart above shows that low energy light bulbs are one of those special beasts that save energy, carbon and money. That gives us a negative cost of energy and carbon, and a saving of carbon for every kWh saved. This is not uncommon for energy efficiency projects. Looking at marginal abatement cost curves (MAC curves) you will find a lot of the energy efficiency measures lie below the zero line, meaning that the cost of carbon is negative.

This type of analysis is a great way of looking at the whole life cost of a project, whether it be a virtually capital-free project such as deciding to use low-energy bulbs rather than incandescent ones, or whether it is a capital-intensive project such as installing solar panels. The numbers in the diagram above can help you come to a decision on whether your idea is worth it.

Energy consumption and income – London

Posted on by Jamie Bull

I read recently on the Green Building Forum the counterintuitive claim that in the UK richer people use the least energy. I’m always interested in the relationship between income and environmental impact – and this is not the way I’d expect the relationship to work. As people have more disposable income, they spend more. They have bigger houses. They are less likely to share those houses. This is also supported by the REAP data which I used on a report for WWF-UK in which more affluent UK cities tended to have higher ecological footprints.

But the claim is apparently based on data from DECC (see the graph) so I thought it deserved a look at least. I don’t want to dismiss the idea out of hand so I went off to see what data was out there to test the theory.

There are of course counter-arguments to the standard view. Perhaps better-off households have more disposable income to invest in energy efficiency measures. Perhaps less well-off households are more likely to be renting and so have little control over how energy efficient their home is.

The data I was looking for is collated by the ONS at the level of something called a Middle Layer Super Output Area or MLSOA. There are figures available for electricity and gas use by each household (or each meter to be specific) [1]. Each MLSOA contains in the region of 3,000 houses and 7,000 occupants.

Income data was harder but I found a file online, although I could only find it for 2004 [2].

I chose London as a test bed as I thought there would be a reasonable range of incomes while keeping the spreadsheet to a manageable size. As it turns out there are only two MLSOAs in the bottom range of income (<£336 weekly disposable household income before housing costs)

There were a few disparities between the number of meters and the number of households. This could be because of unmetered communal heating systems where one meter serves a number of homes. It could also be affected by new homes and/or demolitions in between data collection. In any case the total level of disagreement was fairly low, and could be expected to be randomly distributed.

Domestic gas and electricity use in London

Carbon emissions in London

So taking London as our first example we can see that in an urban setting domestic energy use is strongly correlated with income. Transport may be a different matter but unfortunately there isn’t data to test this at the same level of disaggregation.

I chose London as a test bed as I thought there would be a reasonable range of incomes while keeping the spreadsheet to a manageable size. As it turns out there are only two MLSOAs in the bottom range of income (<£336 weekly disposable household income before housing costs). I’ll expand this to cover a larger distribution of MLSOA types – rural as well as urban – in the future.

I’d love to track down the data source for SteamyTea’s graph above to see where the disagreement comes from. But I’m not about to pay £50 to register for the Green Building Forum just for that. If any GBF members are reading this and fancy asking I’d be very grateful. Edited: Thanks to Nick in  the comments correcting my dodgy eyesight I’ve now stumped up my £5 (not £50) to join the Green Building Forum so will try and get hold of that data from SteamyTea.

References

Energy data at the MLSOA level (2008)

Income data at MLSOA level (2004)

Zero carbon homes and offsets

Posted on by Jamie Bull

This “greenest government ever” has been letting out hints that “zero carbon homes” might mean something quite different by the time 2016 comes around. Already “allowable solutions” have been floated, meaning that not all of the carbon reductions need to come from on site. The number floated by the Zero Carbon Hub was 70% of the reductions to come from on-site measures – a combination of fabric energy efficiency (FEES) and on-site renewables.

Allowable solutions are essentially a form of carbon offset scheme. The remaining emissions from a new home are totted up, and emissions to that level are reduced elsewhere, whether that be by putting renewable energy on a different building or by making an existing building more efficient.

This it not necessarily a bad idea. There is a limited pot of money out there and on-site renewables are certainly not always the most efficient way to spend it. Of course, in the same way that carbon offset schemes need to meet a number of conditions before they become reputable, there are a number of conditions that need to be met before this new definition of zero carbon becomes anything more than a sell-out to the housebuilding industry.

Additional

The first and most important test of an offset scheme is “is this contributing reductions which would not have happened anyway?”. The greatest criticism levelled at schemes like the Clean Development Mechanism is that it was funding things like hydro-electric plants which were already a good investment. It is hard to make a case for projects like retro-fitting insulation being additional where there is already a business case to do insulate. On the other hand, as I talked about in the lock-in effect post, it may be that an additional pot of money could mean that the insulation can be installed to a greater depth than would otherwise have paid back.

Measurable

Another difficult question is measurability. It is not so hard to measure the energy savings made, or the energy generated by a renewable energy system. However it does cost money.

As a consultant with a background in academia, I happen to think that that is money spent on measurement and monitoring is well-spent. Rules of thumb and factors are all well and good, but they need to be checked against ongoing installations. Ideally there should be a central collection of the data generated (anonymised if need be) so that researchers can test their theories and government can be judged on the success of their policies.

How much more convincing would the late 2009 report from London South Bank on carbon savings under the London Plan have been if it had been based on more real-world measurements rather than estimates? Part two of the project is intended to do just that, but I’ve yet to see any sign of it despite the authors’ intention to publish early in 2010. I’ve emailed them so hopefully we can find out when it’s coming out.

Socially beneficial

With the loss of focus on the fuel poverty agenda we seem to have forgotten that one of the most important reasons for energy efficiency is that is means people can afford to heat their homes to a comfortable level. New homes built to Code level 3 cost a lot less to heat than old solid-walled properties. If we can start spending some of the money that would otherwise have pushed a new Code 3 home to a new Code 6 home on bringing existing homes up to a better standard then that is surely a win-win situation?

Further social benefits could be delivered by educational projects, for example renewable energy installations on schools, with built in meters so the performance of the kit can be monitored as a part of school science lessons.

Summary

These are just a few arguments for what would be needed from an offset scheme for zero carbon homes. At least from one that I could support. To restate:

1) The savings have to be additional. That means they have to be beyond what is currently a cost-effective investment.

2) The savings have to be measurable. That means careful monitoring and sharing information on what is and isn’t delivering.

3) The projects should have a social benefit. That means concentrating on alleviating fuel poverty and on educational projects

Only if these three conditions are met can I support any watering down of standards. There are other conditions such as requiring a minimum level of fabric energy efficiency, but in terms of the requirements for an offset scheme, these three are the conditions I hope to see met.

European Union renewables targets and energy efficiency

Posted on by Jamie Bull

The post the other day about Local Authorities and renewable energy targets got me thinking about the EU renewable energy target (15% of energy to come from renewable sources by 2020) and how that compares with a mandated onsite renewable energy target à la Merton Rule.

The difficulty with mandating a renewable energy target is that it is not the real objective of the policy. The real aim is to have enough low carbon energy to provide sufficient goods and services. That aim would be just as well met by improving energy efficiency, at least in the short to medium term.

The alternative is to have carbon reduction targets. And we do also have EU targets expressed in this way. The analogy in UK building regulations is between the SAP methodology and the Merton Rule. My thoughts on the problems with that are in the Merton Rule report card.

In the same way as with a Merton Rule, the EU mandated renewable energy target drives down the value of energy efficiency projects. It is true that energy efficiency does help in reaching the renewables target, by reducing the overall amount of energy consumed (ignoring the rebound effect for the moment).

However, for every tonne of carbon you save, you only move 0.15 tCO2 towards the renewables target. That means the value of energy efficiency to the government is only up to 15% of the value of renewables.

Of course this is simplistic as there are all sorts of other policy drivers and commitments (fuel poverty, energy security, etc). The basic point remains. A mandated level of renewable energy in conjunction with a mandated carbon reduction target means that the most efficient way of reducing carbon is not the most cost-effective way of meeting the target.

Could this be why the last government was so slow to encourage real energy efficiency measures on the existing stock?

Oil spills and EROEI

Posted on by Jamie Bull

The setting of boundaries is hugely important in calculating EROEI. Where do you stop with bringing in other costs? If it’s not on the financial balance sheet can you ignore it? I would say no – if it has an effect, it goes in. That seems to be a limitation of input-output analyses. Where do the costs of externalities feature?

I think Gail Tverberg (Gail the Actuary at TOD), author of this post is onto something. As an aside to talking about removing the limited liability cap for oil spills she talks about the relationship of EROEI to regular ROI.

“If limits [to the liability of oil companies for clean-up costs] are raised from $$75 million to $10 billion, the higher limits will, to some extent, raise costs for oil companies. This is in a way, a form of decreased of Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI). More costs are now explicitly being paid for (and more money is going to fund lawyers, and expended self-insurance programs). Raising liability to unlimited would theoretically raise costs more, and have a greater impact of EROI.” found via Oil Spill Updates

What the piece is saying is that some of the costs which were external costs to the oil company would now be reabsorbed onto their bottom line. In fact, they would be shared across the oil industry as higher insurance premiums. One of the difficulties with calculating an EROEI based on the financially-based input-output method (as many currently are) is that these costs are unlikely to be captured, especially if the oil company does not even have to be insured for all of them.

However, the issue here is not that the actual EROEI is being reduced as far as society is concerned. The clean-up will still happen (or not happen depending where the spill occurs – see below) with all the associated energy costs for clean-up ships, dispersants, etc. What would happen is that the financial cost of producing oil would come closer to reflecting the true EROEI.

This also says something about the idea of a “true” EROEI. The cost of cleaning up that is undertaken because we feel that the spiller should be doing something may well be higher than the cost of letting nature take its course. So the EROEI of an energy resource is not something inherent to it. In the same way as ROI does, EROEI also depends on the extraneous restraints that are placed on it by society.

As an example of this, another interesting point in the article is an image showing the varying costs of cleaning up a barrel of oil spilled in various places around the world from this paper.

The obvious outlier is the USA. The original paper makes it clear that there are many reasons for this disparity, but come down in large part to location. As an illustration of this, the Exxon Valdez spill was in a very bad location and the effect is had on average clean-up costs is massive, approximately tripling them from around $24,500/tonne to $73,000/tonne.

Countries where there are tight environmental controls and a high value placed on the natural environment will generally have higher clean-up costs. As the paper the map comes from says:

“Media coverage often increases social pressure to return areas impacted by an oil spill to their former “pristine” condition… Especially in the United States, fear of future litigation often impels spillers to mount massive response operations—at considerable expense—to dispel any notions of “irresponsibility.” Estimating Cleanup Costs for Oil Spills

This factor is reflected in the effect on EROEI of the clean-up. This also says something about the idea of a “true” EROEI. The cost of cleaning up that is undertaken because we feel that the spiller should be doing something may well be higher than the cost of letting nature take its course. So the EROEI of an energy resource is not something inherent to it.

Just the same as with financial ROI, the calculation of EROEI depends on the extraneous restraints that are placed on it by society to limit and internalise external costs.

And well it should. The external costs of fossil-fuelled energy are huge and rising the higher the concentration of atmospheric CO2 gets. If the long-term cost of environmental damages were to be properly accounted for in EROEI calculations, I have a feeling fossil fuels would be well on their way to the point of futility.

UK Local Authorities and EU renewable energy targets

Posted on by Jamie Bull

UK Local Authorities and EU renewable energy targets

Yesterday saw the launch of a report from SPRU at University of Sussex and Friends of the Earth entitled Transforming the UK’s Energy System: Policies for the 2020 Renewables Target and Beyond. It consists of a review of where we are now on the path towards meeting the UK’s 2020 renewable energy targets and recommendations of where we need to go to get there.

I’m going to focus on the implications for Local Authorities, but to put that in context the authors’ key recommendations are:

1) Make bolder policy decisions

Stronger central government will be required to step up and make the hard decisions necessary to meet the 2015 target. The coalition has been very strong on cutting budgets, but new policy has been thinner on the ground. This will have to change if we are to meet the targets.

2) Provide more effective financial support

Replace (boldly) or supplement (less boldly) the Renewables Obligation with a feed-in tariff for larger scale renewables, and bring on the Renewable Heat Incentive. These measures would certainly help meet the EU target, although not necessarily delivering the cheapest carbon savings initially.

3) Encourage meso-scale renewables

Meso-scale is the neglected scale between large centralised systems (like nuclear, fossil and large-scale wind electricity) and micro-renewables on a household or building scale. This scale of development needs specific local policies and understanding and I’ll come back to it.

4) Infrastructure

The report mentions an interconnected European grid but focuses on a requirement for increased capacity for the National Grid and for district heat mains. They also talk about the potential for smart grids.

5) Industrial policy

The authors encourage active industrial policy. However they point out the need for monitoring and the power to withdraw support if experience shows that the policy is failing. This makes sense as it is all-too easy for an industry that relies on subsidies to become a powerful lobbying voice, even after it seems that those subsidies will need to remain indefinitely.

The place of Local Authorities

In a press release on the report Tony Bosworth, Senior Climate Campaigner at FoE said:

“Local authorities are key to effectively tackling climate change – and they are best placed to deliver community-scale green electricity schemes that will help us meet renewable energy targets, as well as create jobs and slash fuel bills for people living in the area.”

The report itself suggests that Local Authorities are at the heart of whether the UK will meet its 2020 target. This is certainly the case given the current situation in which the middle tranche of coordination – the Regional Development Agencies – has been stripped away.

I share the authors’ concern at this. There are other more informal arrangements being made to encourage coordinated action across LA boundaries such as the South London Waste Partnership between Merton, Kingston, Sutton and Croydon. This type of initiative is needed if resources and opportunities are not to be wasted simply because they’re in the next District, Borough or County. That is what the RDAs were supposed to be for, a cross-authority planning body for social, economic and environmental benefits.

Working with councils on this sort of thing – developing and assessing the viability of renewable energy and sustainable construction policy really opens your eyes to some of the real people and ideas that will be involved in hitting the 2020 target. One of the key things is the role they have in pointing out opportunities and creating incentives for things like district heating and local CHP. The SPRU/FoE report adapts a table from Foresight (2008) showing the missing sector of region, city, town and neighbourhood scaled policies and incentives. LAs have done a good job on encouraging the micro-renewables, but many have not really pushed for those meso-scales that are required.

There is further room for optimism here as a number of councils have ambitions to create innovative new ways of encouraging developers to build to higher targets, or to deliver financing for community scale renewables through local carbon offset[1].

One other forward-looking approach involved looking at testing financial viability of a target against a fixed proportion of the expected gross development value. This featured in Merton’s LDF consultation document, although in the end the idea was not taken forward[2]. If picked up by other LAs, this idea would allow authorities with a wide range of development values to ask for greater targets on higher-value developments than on lower-value ones. This is a reasonable ask, as the cost of 20% renewables on a 5 bed luxury mansion for example is probably equivalent to one of the bathrooms.

There is a nice paragraph in the report describing the multi-scale approach:

“It is not contradictory to envisage a locality with its own smart ‘micro-grid’ for electricity, taking power from a diverse array of local sources, and for this to be fully connected into a UK national grid and further into an international super-grid. It is quite possible that in 2050 or even sooner someone in Krakow will consume a unit of electricity generated by a solar panel on a school in Bedford.” p.6

From an engineering perspective I like this image of wheels within wheels. It’s not exactly a level of built in redundancy, more like built in resilience. If the lights do go out at a national scale it seems like those communities with the forethought to have pushed the installation meso-scale renewables on local heat and power grids will be in the best possible position to keep on going in something like the way they always have. And wouldn’t you prefer to live in the town without power cuts?

So go on, Local Authorities. Make your District, Borough or County the leader in carbon savings, energy security, and fuel poverty reduction. Make the people who live and work there the most secure in the whole country. The national political will is now in your favour so strike while the iron is hot!

[1] As an aside, the downside of innovative ideas like this is that they create the potential for further confusion (one of the inevitable features of localism) due to the ever-shifting development landscape. A repository of information on local planning policies is starting to look more and more necessary in the face of the localism agenda if developers are not to throw their hands up in despair!

[2] CarbonPlan, one of the companies I work with, was involved in creating a model and evidence base to test this policy and I managed much of the technical work myself. Very sad to see it dropped.