Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘climate change’ Category

what air-tightness required for MVHR?

Posted in climate change, energy, engineering, renewable energy on July 4, 2007| 5 Comments »

Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) is often put forward as part of a low-energy design strategy for homes. The principle is that you build your house air-tight to minimise air infiltration and then mechanically supply fresh air via a heat exchanger. This heat exchanger captures the heat energy in the warm outgoing air and transfers it to the fresh incoming air. Some MVHR units can reclaim as much as 90% of outgoing heat, potentially making drastic cuts to your heating load while maintaining high internal air quality (that’s the theory). All of this is part of the build tight, ventilate right strategy that you hear so much about.

But how air-tight do you have to build before MVHR makes sense? I took a look using SAP 2005, and here are the results:

(more…)

Read Full Post »

half of humanity in the city

Posted in architecture, climate change, energy, engineering, london, renewable energy on July 2, 2007| 3 Comments »

state of the world population 2007Next year we reach a milestone unprecedented in history when more than half of all people will live in cities. This comes from the UN’s new State of the World Population report, which strikes an interesting tone. The authors acknowledge the huge risks of increasing rates of urbanisation, particularly for the poor, but also maintain that if we get our urban planning and public administration right, we can design out the worst of our environmental and social problems. And anyway, urbanisation is inevitable because you can’t have economic growth without it.

You could argue that here in the developed world, we’ve got enough urban planning experience under our belts to allow us to meet the challenge. Except that the developed world is not where the real expansion is set to take place. Most of the shift will occur in Asia and Africa where “the accumulated urban growth of these two regions during the whole span of history will be duplicated in a single generation.” So to describe the pace of expansion as breakneck is putting it mildly.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

micro-CHP report delayed (again)

Posted in chp, climate change, energy, engineering, london, micro chp, utilities on July 2, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Just heard from the folks at the Carbon Trust who are doing the micro-CHP field trials. The release date for the next interim report has been pushed back to the end of August with the methodology to follow some time after. Advise not holding breath.

Read Full Post »

portcullis house emissions: pass or fail?

Posted in architecture, climate change, energy, engineering, london, renewable energy on June 12, 2007| 7 Comments »

Phil Clark at Zero Champion sent a request under the Freedom of Information Act for figures on CO2 emissions for Portcullis House, the office building for Members of Parliament across the road from Big Ben. When he received a response he wasn’t sure if performance was good or bad. It’s bad:

(more…)

Read Full Post »

are architects best to give green advice?

Posted in architecture, biomass, chp, climate change, energy, engineering, micro chp, renewable energy on June 11, 2007| 6 Comments »

There was an article in the Guardian last Saturday (thanks to Tessa for spotting it) by Alex James, the bassist from Blur, about having an architect come to his home to give green advice. It’s a scheme run by the RIBA where architects provide green advice in exchange for a donation to charity. At first glance this sounds positive. Certainly it’s a great channel to spread information on energy efficiency.

But things get a little weird when the article states that thick rubble walls keep the house warm in winter – which they don’t. Then architect George Stowell suggests that Alex installs a biomass CHP unit to generate his own electricity on site from wood chips. But there aren’t any commercially available biomass CHP units on a single house scale (or even twenty times that big). He may have meant biomass heating, but it’s a hell of a mistake to make, recommending something that doesn’t exist.

It might be better to send a services engineer. CIBSE should consider something similar to the RIBA programme.

Read Full Post »

work featured in Architecture Today

Posted in architecture, biofuel, biomass, climate change, energy, engineering, renewable energy on May 29, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Chiltern Downs visitors centre

A project I led at XCO2 is being featured in the Ecotech supplement in Architecture Today this month (no link yet). It’s a visitors centre for the National Trust in the Chiltern Downs expected to provide services to around 400,000 visitors a year. And it’s loaded with green goodness: woodchip boiler for space and water heating, rainwater harvesting for toilet flushing, and an earth coupled ventilation system that brings air into the building through a 90m long concrete pipe buried below ground. (more…)

Read Full Post »

a fridge too far

Posted in climate change, energy, house on May 21, 2007| 2 Comments »

freezer iceI was lamenting in a post about compact florescent bulbs how I didn’t know where else we could significantly cut electricity consumption. Then I saw this post from Greenpa. Turns out I wasn’t thinking hard enough.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

answering the 26 most common climate myths

Posted in climate change, energy on May 18, 2007| 1 Comment »

The New Scientist published a fantastic article this week answering the 26 most commonly used arguments against climate change. Keep it close to hand.

Read Full Post »

CHP oversold as a means of reducing carbon

Posted in chp, climate change, energy, engineering, london, micro chp, renewable energy on May 18, 2007| 1 Comment »

Via Tom N, a great article in BSJ on whether CHP (and CHP + cooling) actually has as much potential to reduce carbon emissions as the industry (and Ken Livingstone) would have you believe.

In general, I agree with James Thonger’s conclusions. However… (more…)

Read Full Post »

widening spark gap boosts CHP

Posted in chp, climate change, energy, micro chp, renewable energy on May 17, 2007| 2 Comments »

According to online energy auction house BuyEnergyOnline, during April 2007 UK gas wholesale prices rose by just 1% while electricity prices increased 13%, making the widest spark gap since deregulation. (more…)

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started