Lambeth and energy standards for new buildings

[Peter Lennard]

On this day when school children are walking out of classes to protest at the lack of action on climate change I think it appropriate to share a blog post, as in the link below.

A few years ago, as part of the Lambeth Sustainability Forum, through which I am sending this email, I proposed that Lambeth Council should ‘consider’ (not require) building all new Lambeth Council buildings to the Passivhaus standard. Officers rejected this, on the basis that they built to current building standards and that was all that was required. It was also assumed at the time that no local authority could require private developers to build to higher than the then current standards.

Since then, Lambeth has built a new town hall to ‘current building standards’, which means that it will be out of date in a very few years time - a completely missed opportunity. When I pass it in the evenings the empty building has all floors fully illuminated, so its energy efficiency can’t be taken very seriously. If lighting is kept on for cleaners provision should have been made for it to be provided only where needed - e.g. by providing the well tried and tested technology known as light switches and asking cleaners to turn off the lights when they leave a room.

Meanwhile other more enterprising local authorities have built to higher standards for their own new buildings, notably Exeter, Glasgow and Norwich while Wolverhampton has some Passivhaus schools, one of which I have visited.

However, last summer the government clarified the position of local authorities on this matter and made it clear that they CAN set higher standards, not just for their own buildings, but also require private developers to adopt higher standards too. Please see this blog post.

https://www.greenbuildingstore.co.uk/passivhaus-and-the-climate-emergency/

Lambeth has dabbled with one or two Passivhaus pilot projects and some feedback from these would be interesting to receive, for instance the Akerman Road site, which has the less than ideal orientation of east-west for a Passivhaus project, and therefore a slightly odd site to choose to select for a pilot project when they were concurrently developing a very large site nearby, where orientation and design could have given them a much freer hand.

Peter

[Leon Maurice-Jones]

So did I !!!

Sadly the Sustainability Forum was completely ignored by Lambeth councillors. 

(2 Councilors visited in the 3 years I attended)

We had 50+ experts giving advice and nothing said by any at any time made any difference at all to Lambeth. Not one thing changed. 

Proving for me what out of touch useless wasted organs our councillors and by extension Lambeth is. 

If only Lambeth and it’s Councilors would realise the extreme seriousness of our situation the Sustainability Forum could play a vital role.  

Leon

Leon Maurice-Jones

Carbon neutral by 2030?

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[Duncan Law]

Thanks for all your stalwart work on this, Peter. You are now a knowledge bank that we must harness. Let's actually have that meeting about passivhaus with Lambeth's advisor...

Agree with Leon only that the experience with the Sustainability Forum was disappointing. It did some great work especially around the Lambeth Housing Standard. It was on the point of becoming a Cabinet Advisory Panel with some statutory status, when the Lambeth resource to support it was cut (along with half of Lambeth's officers).

(Cllr) Anna Birley did stalwart work chairing it when TTB no longer had the resources to convene.

Much has changed since 2014. The seriousness is now more widely acknowledge, even if only sometimes with lip-service. But Lambeth was one of the first councils to declare a climate emergency and the School Strike today was focussed on that. The new leader of the council, Jack Hopkins, was the note-taker in the frank early meeting about Climate Change and energy depletion that Shane Collins and I had with the then council leader Steve Reed.

Becca Thackray (Cllr) introduced to Cllr Claire Holland, Cabinet Member for Environment and Clean Air at the School Strike for the Climate in Windrush Square. She is keen to meet about the council's plans to Build strong and sustainable neighbourhoods. I'll recruit a couple of key allies

I attended the Lambeth FOE meeting last night. They have a constitutional remit to connect groups working on the environment. Conor Coulter (copied in) is working to convene those groups into a sharing meeting soon. This could be an opportunity to have a 3 monthly re-convening of the Lambeth Sustainabililty Forum, to share out the monitor and alliance building with Lambeth. Lambeth is still committed to co-designing and co-delivering its plans. Moves are afoot to convene groups working on health and wellbeing. The same can and should happen on 'environment' and 'sustainability' in their widest sense.

Onward together, placing our levers strategically, among which may be Lambeth Council.

Duncan

[Agamemnon Otero]

Hi Leon, Peter & Duncan,

It was a tuff slog last time. But I too am happy to rejoin the Lambeth Sustainability Forum.  The council has indeed changed. 

Warm regards,

Agamemnon 

Co-CEO Repowering, 

Director: Brixton Energy Solar 1,2,3

Sent from my iPhone

[Peter Lennard]

Thanks Agamemnon, Leon and Duncan for your feedback. In particular Duncan you have far more knowledge of what is happening within the council and who’s who in local groups. I’ll be happy to contribute anything I can about Passivhaus, but I’m not in any position to co-ordinate anything as I’m spending more and more time out of London and up in Yorkshire. Perhaps the Sustainability Forum will rise like a phoenix…

One comment I’ve picked up recently from government a bit third hand, and that is fossil fuels i.e. gas will be banned for new houses from 2025. Is this approaching the issue from the wrong direction? I believe so. Like voting for Article 50 with no idea how to get there, this looks like another example of putting the cart before the horse.

Exeter’s Passivhaus council houses are heated by conventional gas boilers. I would guess it wouldn’t be too difficult or expensive 10 or 20 years down the line to  shut down the boilers and fit a simple electric heater into the MVHR system. Fitting a hot water cylinder would be a bit more disruptive, so perhaps stored hot water might be worth looking at for any new housing, to benefit most from the intermittency of renewables. The point is, those current gas heating systems use incredibly little gas, averaging £100 per year. OK, there is the carbon to produce the high tech gas boilers, point taken.

If the lead rule is ‘electricity and not gas’ and the other issues of building fabric, ventilation and solar gain aren’t dealt with effectively, all of which are covered by Passivhaus, then it is possible that the volume house builders, pursuing compliance at lowest cost, will build houses that are using electricity travelling from distant gas fired powered stations, given current policy in favour of fracking, at high prices and low overall efficiency, with probably well insulated houses that overheat in summer and, if trickle ventilated, unnecessarily high electricity bills in the winter, resulting in a public disillusioned with expensive to run supposedly green new houses. Or, if moving from a single glazed uninsulated draughty Victorian house, the new occupants might be very happy with the improvement, but unaware of how much better things could have been.

The government’s answer to rising electricity demand (which is currently falling) presumably would be that we must pump more and more money into nuclear power stations ’to keep the lights on’ which is to be expected if their previous investment into nuclear is compared to investment into renewables and energy efficiency. A cynic might suggest that the timing of this announcement uncannily coincides with nuclear industry and some trade union pressure for a government bailout of the failed Moorside and Wylfa projects, where private industry (sensibly) has concluded that these make no economic sense whatsoever. I fear a forthcoming announcement to pour huge amounts of our money into these two projects, justified by ‘well, all new houses must be all-electric by 2025’.

If 2025 minimum building standards will include minimum standards on airtightness, building fabric energy losses and ventilation then they might as well stop playing at re-inventing the wheel and simply specify the Passivhaus standard, because it has the (unique?) distinction of being planned with a software package that integrates all the necessary parameters, including making best use of solar gain in the winter while avoiding overheating in the summer, the matter of solar gain being the Achilles heel of current building regulations and building systems. It also has an excellent track record of being an accurate predictor of a building’s energy use. Too many buildings predicted to be ‘low energy’ have turned out to be much higher consumers of energy. A comparison of Lambeth Town Hall’s predicted and actual energy consumption would be useful to see, and certainly something councillors should be asking for, once it has completed a full year of being open.

If there is an equally good alternative to the Passivhaus Planning Package (PHPP) software currently available to all architects at as reasonable a cost, that fulfils all the requirements for a low energy house to be both comfortable AND well ventilated in ALL seasons, with normal openable windows, please let me know.

I’m completely away (but on email) from Tuesday until around 5th April.

Peter

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[Zac Monro]

Yes I agree it was a worthy endeavour.

When we tried to get Lambeth Housing on board, they took great pains to keep us at arm’s length, I remember the officer’s suggestion that we male them a ‘little video’! I also agree about the town hall project, and did get involved separately with one of the members to un-pick just how ‘not particularly sustainable’ the winning bid was.

 

If there are real opportunities to make a difference… count us in!

 

 

Zac Monro

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[Leon Maurice-Jones]

Just catching up with this thread. 

Does this mean we are restarting the Sustainability Forum?

And that maybe the council(ers) will take any of it on board?

If so,,

Count me in. 

Leon Maurice-Jones

Carbon neutral by 2030?