PV Panels, Permanent or Ephemeral?

While the PV market lurches from good to bad, like a lonely drunk, there are some issues that are a constant, and clients ask me whether PV panels should go onto the roof or into the roof. Should the PV be integrated or not?

My view is firmly not. Its a bit like asking, twenty years ago, should I build an Atari computer into my home as a Building Management System, or use a Pentium 2 to power a mainframe computer. The PV industry is maturing rapidly as a volume production industry, and already starting to exhibit the type of behaviour demonstrated by the computer industry  over the last two decades, of continuous improvement in efficiency and continuous drops in cost.

The likelihood is that manufacturers will continue to innovate and improve panel performance over the next few decades to take advantage of Feed-in-Tariffs available in many countries around the world. As panel costs drop and energy prices continue to rise, it is likely that PV systems will pay for themselves in a reasonable period without subsidy within the next decade. As the panels that are already installed begin to degrade, as all current systems do over time, then a point will be reached when it is no longer cost-effective to maintain existing systems, particularly when they reach the end of a Feed-in-tariff period. At that point the panels should be replaced with a new system to get best value.

Therefore it makes no sense to me to install PV as built-in systems that cannot easily be replaced. PV tile systems will require replacement of entire sections of roofs, and there is no guarantee that those systems will be available at a point so far into the future.  Other panel systems that form part of facades are even more problematic as the carrier systems that they rely on may or may not accept replacement panels. Who knows what form PV panels will take in future years. As new production systems come online, the look, thickness, size and colour of panels will change.

PV systems are in their infancy and it is best to treat them as relatively ephemeral parts of buildings, consider their integration with facades and roofs by all means, but don’t build them in, and don’t rely on them for part of the fabric performance. Make sure that they can be easily removed at any stage, and be prepared to accept that they can be replaced by a new system which may look nothing like the system that was originally designed. We cannot forsee the future of PV panel systems any more than we can forsee anything else.

Cycling – are our policies working?

Is this the way to promote cycling?

The evidence for the success or failure of current cycling policies across the UK is mixed. Apart from some major successes, particularly in London, cycling rates are rising in the UK, mainly for leisure trips, but are still extremely small compared to other European neighbours with a similar climate, population density and geography.

Junior School children nationally do not cycle to school. A large proportion walk,(55%) but 39% travel by car, adding significantly to traffic congestion and denying children and parents exercise.

The use of shared surfaces where cars pedestrians and cyclists share the street  are recommended by DfT and Sustrans, This favours the active and aware cyclist but not children or the less fit. This policy seems to be guided by the idea that when cyclists occupy the road they are more visible and therefore safer. Segregated cycle lanes are less favoured because experience in the UK of using them results in many accidents at the points where cyclists leave the lanes. Sometimes because the junction with other traffic is not well-designed, sometimes because the cyclist is going too fast, or because other drivers or pedestrians are not expecting the cyclist to appear.

But shared surfaces are less popular with pedestrians who feel exposed to danger from cyclists and from cars.

I have concluded that the reason for this state of affairs is that policy officers must consult, and the people who are available to be consulted are those who are cycling already. There is no-one to represent the millions of people who would like to cycle but are too fearful to do so. The result is cycling policy that favours those who are already confident cyclists and ignores the needs of children, most women, and older people who are unlikely to deck themselves out in Lycra.

For our friends on the Continent there doesn’t appear to be any doubt that segregated cycle lanes are the way forward, they are busy and successful. The success appears largely down to their use, there are fewer accidents because they are well-designed and well used, and no one is surprised that they are being used. There have been many studies carried out on the improvement or lack of it in cycling safety due to the use of cycle tracks. This study appeals to me because it makes perfect sense, the more cycle tracks there are, the more people use them, the more people use them the less likely they are to have an accident. Accident numbers will go up, particularly in the beginning as people learn to use the tracks, but will drop as the visibility of cyclists increases.

To see examples of what cycling to school could be like visit this website and watch some of the videos.

http://www.hembrow.eu/cycling/photos.html

Cycle Rates in UK (Summary)
Cycling on the road in the UK has increased 12% up the last 10 years (using 3 year
rolling average).
The biggest increase has been on surfaces other than the road. The % Cycling
‘mainly on the road’ has fallen from 46% (2002) to 40% 2009[1]
London has seen the biggest boom with over 110% increase since 2000.

Britain is spending more on bikes.

Cycling is a diverse activity with participants from all socio-economic groups, but

cycling rates are highest amongst young professional men.

How do we compare with our neighbours?
Cycling Rates in the UK compared with other countries with similar geography, climate
and population density.

• Holland – 27% of trips, 848 km per person per year
• Denmark – 19%, 936 km pp/year
• Germany – 10%, 291 km pp/year
• UK – 2%, 75 km pp/year

Is cycling becoming more or less popular?

http://cyclinginfo.co.uk/blog/2636/cycling/stats-uk/

These stats are a little out of date, I cannot find up-to-date national stats, if anyone does know please let me know and I’ll update this.

This is what ‘taking cycling seriously looks like’

Ciclovia happens once a week in Bogota,every Sunday between 7am and 2pm. 120km of roads are shut to cars and opened up to cyclists, walkers and people to enjoy. It’s fun, with around 30% of locals, or 2 million people, taking part.

Cycle routes in Bogota Colombia

‘A cycle route that is not safe for an 8
year old is not a cycle route’ Enrique
Penalosa, Mayor of Bogota

High Court rules against Govt in Feed-in-Tariff dispute

UPDATE: A bizarre statement from DECC today here defending their position in launching an appeal on the Fits ruling in the High Court. The statement ends with the sentence:

We have also made the point that the judicial review was premature as no decision has yet been taken, and a decision will only be taken after a full analysis of the responses to the consultation

The reason for the successful ruling was that DECC HAD made a decision and that decision was to be implemented before the consultation was finished.

 

PREVIOUS POST

The High Court ruled in favour of the action brought against the Government by Friends of the Earth and others for the premature cuts in the Feed-in-Tariff. The ruling prevents the Government from appealing the decision. The action was brought because the FiT cut was more stringent than expected, earlier than promised and because the actual cut was programmed to come into force before the consultation on the cut was finished.

Coming as it does on the same day that the Select Committee sent back the National Planning Policy Framework and advised Government to change the presumption in favour of development as it is ‘too vague’, this is a good day for activism and the third sector versus a Government trying to reboot the market by any means available to it.

Growth at any price should not be an approach favoured by any Government, and sustainable energy should not be a pick-and-mix approach subject to the whims of ministers. We can find money to build roads, Crossrail and High Speed Rail, so why not for renewable energy?

The Government now has to spend the Christmas holidays picking itself up and dusting itself off in preparation for a gruelling session in Parliament to get both its renewable energy and planning legislation back on track. Not the Christmas present they would have wanted.

Meanwhile a number of organisations across the UK, Local Authorities, householders, Registered Social Landlords, must be asking themselves the question, should I revive the plans for large scale PV rollouts in light of this decision? They now have the three months until April to get systems installed and registered. But there is a significant risk that the Government will find another way to cut the tariffs early, and will there be sufficient appetite in the solar industry, already bruised, to have a second go in the courts.

Here is how our politicians dealt with the news today on Twitter, mature?

Ed Miliband 

Government defeat in Courts on feed in tariff shows what a ridiculous mess they have made of a decent policy. So much for greenest gov ever.

GregBarkerMP

Ed_Miliband yr legacy Ed. Boom & bust, no budget controls 4#FiTs. Just how much more wld u have added to our bills by over paying 4 solar?

The Green Deal #3 Delivery

I am troubled by the implication that buyers of Green Deal packages are going to ‘shop around’ for a Green Deal solution. I understand why this is proposed by DECC, after all what kind of a market would the Green Deal be if there were no ‘shopping’ to be done in it. But it troubles me to imagine a Green Deal result where one property has work done to it by one Green Deal Provider, while next door the same work is done by another Green Deal Provider. This immediately doubles the number of deliveries, and introduces the risk, particularly with solid wall insulation, that two neighbours will end up with different solutions that creates an unhappy result for both. In addition, the opportunity to save costs on both measures and improve the profit margin for the Green Deal Provider has been lost, and both GDP’s lose out. Neither of these outcomes seem to me to be positive ones and ought to be avoided in a sophisticated process such as the Green Deal.

What if a Local Authority could ‘shop’ on residents behalf and could

-ensure that they are getting the best deal on a street by street or ward-by-ward basis, and

-ensure that the appearance of measure was within planning guidelines(for solid wall insulation) and

-that there were no unpleasant surprises, varying thicknesses, clashing colours, etc.

The installation of measures could then be delivered on an area basis to ensure that the fewest tonnes of CO₂ were emitted in the delivery of the measures. One van delivers the people and the equipment and the materials instead of ten or twenty vans. If we are going to attempt to create a market to save CO₂ we need to consider ALL the CO₂ in the process and not just the operational CO₂.

The End of the Beginning – COP 17

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. Henceforth climate sceptics in the UK, US, Canada, Japan, India and China will meet equally well funded, and perhaps better funded delegates. Hence forth they will have to face in many theatres of debate a real superiority in science which they have so often pretended to use without basis against others, of which they boasted all round the world, and which they intended to use as an instrument for convincing all other peoples that all resistance to them was hopeless….
(with apologies to Winston Churchill)

The Green Deal Consultation #2 The Assessment Process

There are a number of concerns in the industry around the assessment process:

-the assessment process for the Green Deal requires an assessment of the property by an accredited Green Deal Assessor. Without this there can be no Green Deal. This means that the Green Deal Assessor needs to be able to assess a property for suitable measures, calculate the improvements, and agree the plan with the resident. This is a very different job from the traditional EPC Domestic Energy Assessors, many of whom are paid a pittance and (if the amount of cloned EPC data on RHP’s books is to be believed) haven’t even visited the properties that are supposed to be assessed. The likelihood is that many of these DEA’s will retrain as Green Deal Assessors (GDA’s) Will they be able to carry  out this much more demanding role?

I think that this is an opportunity for building surveyors and architects to enter this market. The market will need people who understand buildings in the round, and who can assess whether a measure is viable as well as beneficial in energy efficiency terms.

-the consultation is open to how the assessment process is paid for and envisages that in some cases the assessment will be paid for by the Green Deal Provider, the company carrying out the work. When the Green Deal Plan is agreed between the GDA and the occupier, the Plan must be costed by multiple Green Deal Providers. This means that if a Green Deal Provider pays for a hundred plans, they may only get the work from thirty or so, so the value to them is uncertain.

I think that it makes more sense for the cost of the assessment process to be set at a flat rate which is then rolled into the cost of every Green Deal Plan, in the same way that a mortgage provider rolls in the cost of arranging the mortgage finance. This would allow the market to find the best way of delivering the assessment in an independent way without putting uncertain costs onto the Green Deal Plan. It would mean that the Green Deal Assessment process is independent of the Green Deal Providers, as a guaranteed income would attract professionals into the market, and their Green Deal Plans would be sufficiently high quality for the Green Deal Providers to use to tender for the works. If the Green Deal Providers do not have confidence in the plans they will either, not tender, or have to visit the site and carry out their own assessment process anyway, thus duplicating the effort and cost of the assessment process.

Green Deal Consultation #1 First Contact

This is the first of a number of blogs about the recently published Green Deal consultation: At 267 pages it is a mammoth document, and there are not many days before the response is due. 18th January 2012 is the response date. I will be submitting a response on behalf of HTA and a number of our clients with whom we have been discussing the Green Deal for some months now.

I am attending the UK Green Building Council consultation on Wed 30th (tomorrow) and I am chairing the final session on the Green Deal at the London Housing Forum event on Thursday. Suffice to say that I will be reasonably clued-up about the Green Deal by then.

First Impressions:

- I am glad to see that there is a strong statement to the effect that the Green Deal can be a huge opportunity for people to improve the quality and value of their homes. I think that this is key to its success and this has not been emphasised enough to date.

- It is a new market, and a great opportunity for companies old and new to compete in it, there is room for everybody!

- There is recognition that the Green Deal will often be delivered alongside other works, but there is too little discussion of the complexity that this brings. If a householder engages a company to fit a kitchen and then decides to go down a Green Deal route, the kitchen installer may not be able to offer to do the extra works and a new company may be required. This will put some people off.

- I am still concerned that there is no energy efficiency target for dwellings carrying out the GD. Without a target there is the strong likelihood that the sam dwelling will need to be treated many times between now and 2050 instead of doing it once properly. I think that this is too short term thinking.

- I have seen little, so far, to encourage a street-by-street approach where a Green Deal Provider takes on a neighbourhood en masse and delivers the works on a rolling programme over a period of say five years per ward. That would encourage GD Providers to doorknock and to really sell their wares. The document talks about homeowners getting a Green Deal Assessment and then shopping around. This is frankly unrealistic. We are not talking about a few groceries here, and very few householders are comfortable ashopping around for External Wall Insulation.

- There are strong statements about the importance of the independent Green Deal Assessor who carries out the assessment and identifies the measures that are relevant and which will pay for themselves under the ‘Golden Rule’. Why then is is allowable for Green Deal providers to employ an assessor and choose how much to charge for the assessment? I see plenty of opportunity for assessors working for a provider who likes External Wall Insulation and the assessor only specifying EWI because it suits his/her employer.

- If homeowners are encouraged to shop around, then a Green Deal provider could subsidise the cost of the assessment, only for the homeowner to take the assessment to a competitor and seek a better price for the work.

- There is a statement that a new version of rDSAP will be used to carry out the asssessment, but full SAP will also be valid when used by a SAP assessor. This is sensible, but there is no information that I am aware of about when these tools will be available for evaluation and testing. The recent history of timely releases of the software to assessors is not good.

-There is mention of the possibility of multiple Green Deals being possible on the same property, which is puzzling and offers the potential for very confusing electricity bills for future owners of the property. I accept the possibility that works can happen at different times, but these works should be folded into the same Green Deal so that there is only one fund for the property.

-There is a proposal to appoint a Green Deal Administrator, who will monitor that the targeted savings are generally being achieved by the scheme and that the Green Deal is functioning as planned. One wonders what the outcome will be if it is discovered that this is not the case.

I will cover more of the document in a few days time.

Zero Carbon London

I attended a roundtable hosted by the NLA last week on Zero Carbon housing in London. The purpose was to discuss the issues around zero carbon, whether the current definition is appropriate in London, and how to develop policy in this area. The event was well attended by housing consultants, with the NLA, Zero Carbon Hub and DCLG represented.

It was interesting to hear that little analysis has been done to date on the impact of the new definition of Zero Carbon on housing projects over four stories. The current definition is aimed primarily at the housebuilder market who mainly develop suburban sites, rather than on developers who bring denser urban sites to market. DCLG and the ZCH acknowledged that there is a piece of work to do on assessing medium and high-rise dwellings.

The likelihood is that the Fabric Energy Efficiency Standard will not be difficult for higher rise buildings because of the inherent efficiencies in building more dense developments. But achieving Carbon Compliance will be much more difficult because the use of PV as a proxy for CO2 reductions will not work in this context. The ratio of roof to floorspace won’t be high enough.

There was a lot of discussion about the potential for district heating schemes to fill this gap, some were in favour, and some against. There was some realism from the engineers present, acknowledging that some district heating schemes have an efficiency of only 30%. This may be caused by poor design and implementation, and would change dramatically as such systems proliferate. But the problem is that there is no sign that these systems will proliferate, they are simply too expensive in capital terms to be viable in the current market.

The alternative which was discussed at length, is the upgrading of the existing housing stock. In London there is a huge backlog of poorly performing dwellings that need energy efficiency upgrades and the Allowable Solutions monies coming from new development in London could be pooled to fund these upgrades. A likely figure for the monies available is £1500 per new dwelling after 2016, and if London achieves a target of 30,000 units per year, this could deliver £45M of annual funding. This could pay for 4,500 external wall insulation retrofits per year.

While it may be chickenfeed in the context of the Green Deal it is still worth doing, and worth delivering guaranteed emission savings, immediately. That is worth having.

The New Housing Strategy

How does the new, much leaked housing strategy stack up from a sustainability perspective? Is there anything in it to make a sustainista happy, or just a bit less grumpy with the ‘Greenest Government,Ever’?

Recycling land that is currently underused is a very sustainable thing to do. Anything that means we build on less green field land is a very good thing. Greenfield land should be used for growing things, not putting buildings on. Local Authority land in particular will be brownfield land that is underused and in towns and cities and has a lot of potential to host sustainable developments.

Spending £50M on bringing disused homes back into use would be a very good thing if they were to be refurbished to a highly efficient standard first. Perhaps Ministers could use these empty homes as a preparation for the Green Deal and carry out works to them before releasing them back on the market. This would help to build up skills in the refurbishment market, pilot the Green Deal and improve the overall sustainability of the housing stock. The easiest time to refurbish properties is when they are empty.

Update: This is provided for in the Housing Strategy: ‘We are encouraging Private Registered Providers and private owners to take advantage of the Green Deal as they renovate properties to bring them back into use.‘

It is interesting to note that despite using the word sustainable or sustainability many times in the document, there are no standards applied to either the new homes to be built, or to the homes to be renovated.

The use of Right-to-Buy on the other hand, is a nonsense, in sustainability terms and in economic terms. In round terms we are going to sell off properties at less than half their market value to affordable housing tenants, and use this money to build new homes. Unfortunately the money gained will not be enough to maintain the affordable housing numbers so the amount of affordable housing stock will drop. This may win votes but it looks like an expensive way to do it.

Do you know the way to Sustainia? I’ve got a lot of friends in Sustainia.

After reading “Seven Years to Save the Planet!” I was interested to read the latest offerings from our friends in Copenhagen working in the Green Growth Leaders team. These people are very interested in ‘selling’ sustainability because many of their businesses are based on products or services that will lead us to a more sustainable future, and because they are genuinely interested in a more sustainable future for us all. I have no problem with companies marketing sustainability to me, provided that their claims of greeness are accurate.

I was fascinated by their recent publication called ‘Sustainia‘, a guide to achieveing a more sustainable future. Instead of Bill McGuires doom-mongering, this much shorter offering aims to paint such a beautiful picture of a sustainable future that we are all going to want it immediately. Of the two strategies this seems to hold more promise for the majority of the population who will only believe doom-mongering when the flood/avalanche/lavaflow/duststorm/apocalypse actually hits them and not one minute before.

I liked the effort that has gone into Sustainia even though some of it is too much like marketing speak rather than real fiction. If they could only persuade Haruki Murakami to write it, it would be much better.

They sum up their ambition by quoting Antoine de Saint Exupery:

"If you want to build a ship, don't
drum up people to collect wood and
don't assign them tasks and work, but
rather teach them to long for the endless
immensity of the sea."

I take their point, but at some stage you DO have to collect wood, and assign tasks, or else nothing would ever happen! I also liked their point that if Martin Luther King had said ‘I have a nightmare!’ the likelihood is that his speech wouldn’t have had quite the same impact. This sounds trite but I think that it contains a very important core of wisdom. The environmental movement has been crying Wolf! unsuccessfully now for about forty years. It is time to try a different form of warning and persuasion. We can’t wait for the wolf to turn up to be proven right.