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ODPM Overlooks Energy Savings in Buildings

Posted: 07/02/2006

The Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB) claims to have uncovered strong evidence that demonstrates an urgency for the UK Government to adopt more rigorous building standards far more quickly in the effort to combat climate change. The evidence shows that higher standards and more rigorous design and construction techniques could save 9 million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2020, 21 million tonnes a year by 2030 and 45 million tonnes a year by 2050.

The research, carried out by a team of energy experts for the association, shows current energy performance measurement tools are inaccurate, causing the UK to substantially under predict CO2 reductions from building new homes with improved thermal envelope and energy efficiency standards. They also suggest that SAP 2005 (Standard Assessment Procedure) worksheets need to expand their coverage of energy efficiency technologies in order to give realistic results for the UK’s currently proposed set of advanced energy performance standards.

The concern is that ODPM is inadvertently overestimating potential savings from improvements to the building regulations Approved Document L1, while at the same time underestimating the much higher level of savings which could be achieved by using other advanced UK energy performance standards already developed.

AECB Executive Officer, Andrew Simmonds said: “We have looked at the basic BREDEM and SAP tools and they have a number of significant flaws. When we examined the inherent flaws in the procedures, our research shows it is possible that space heating energy use for dwellings built under Approved Document L1 2002 could be more than double what is currently calculated, meaning these buildings are performing twice as badly as currently assumed. The problem is we are not monitoring homes and we don’t actually know with adequate certainty what level of CO2 savings successive revisions to the Building Regulations have made”.

The organisation has submitted its findings to the Energy Saving Trust and hopes that EST will adopt its ‘higher’ standards (known as Silver and Gold!) in its Energy Efficiency Best Practice for Homes Programme, currently under review.

“We have been engaging with EST on the principles and with BRE on the technical details of the proposed new standards. This is an ongoing process towards developing a joint set of robust standards designed to help the UK achieve its CO2 reduction targets" continued Simmonds.

“With the support of these two key organisations we want to persuade the ODPM to adopt our higher standards in its Code for Sustainable Homes. We are making bold attempts to harmonise standards across the board and believe that one strong set of energy performance standards could be adequately resourced. We believe that following on from the standards there has to be consistent support, training and guidance in order to realise the full CO2 savings possible. We have to prioritise reducing CO2 emissions associated with buildings. At the end of the day we will build our way to disaster if even ‘green’ buildings continue to squander energy.”

At present the proposed Code for Sustainable Homes does not include a “bottom line” for advanced energy performance. Under CO2 emissions it only contains Building Regulations up to 2006 standards.

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