I’ve been working on an Ecotect training document for a while, it is still a work in progress, but see what you think so far. Ecotect for site analysis

as it is a work in progress, if you want to put notes on the tutorial and send it back, that’d be very much appreciated!

I snuck it onto the tutorials page a while ago, but I didn’t announce it. If there is enough enthusiasm in the comments I’ll carry on working on it.

In the last few months I’ve made a few steps in finding the source of this number, and it seems that it might pay to be a bit more careful while using it in future. (Seems – I’d like to know if anyone knows better.)

The most likely source of the number comes from CIBSE guide F. (Thanks Sophie for finding it, I know I’ve been a terrible bore about this subject.)

all adds up to 46% - eureka! It has been found! Lets just cross our Ts and dot our Is to be sure.

This table comes from the ‘Digest of UK energy statistics (London: The Stationery Office)’, and was published in 2000. There are a couple of tricky things here, one glaring, and one that takes a bit of digging. Firstly, 2000 was 11 years ago, and the odds are that the data are even older. 12 years ago I looked like this! These data are published annually and a lot happens in 12 years – is it still a valid number to be quoting? I had a look, and the stationary office doesn’t publish that data any more, it is the the Department of Energy and Climate Change‘s thing.

The places that I’ve been most successful in finding useful information are:

• Eurostat:Using official statistics to calculate greenhouse gas emissions: A statistical guide html version, pdf.
• Department of Energy in the US

If there is an up to date figure then I’d love to see it, it’d make me feel like much less of a fraud when I try to convince people about this kind of thing.

There will be a version of this available soon in a massively reduced format, but for those of you with a penchant for punishment, or perhaps just an unquenchable interest in my ability to drivel on for a hundred pages, here’s my Major study in all it’s pdf glory!

If you haven’t had a go:

BPquiz

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There have been a lot of long nights of faffing about with learning about the technology that runs the internet, But now the building performance quiz is live, working reasonably well in most browsers, and has started producing results!

So “what is it?” I hear you ask!

There are a couple of reasons that I can’t tell you everything about it just yet. But for now it is a quiz that shows up what you know and don’t know about designing for building performance within the emerging low carbon economy.

The key thing is that a lot of people have a go at the quiz, so if you have a screen, and some time, then please do it, and if you have all of the above, and friends, then send it to all of them and beg them to do it too. Please!!!

have a go!

BPquiz.co.uk

• In mathematical notation ? stands in for ‘tends to‘.
• In ‘optimisation‘ the focus is on the approach to optimum, and therefore a much better description is ‘improvement’.

Now on with the meat of this story.

There was a recent day for academics at Cardiff University organised by the RIBA. It’s planned objective was to integrate carbon neutrality into design briefs. However, from the reports I’ve had, the event was somewhat hijacked by the inability to decide on what ‘zero carbon’ really means.

Hearing about this gave me some of those strange wavy flashbacks, the kind of thing that you’d get in a program like Happy Days when Richy Cunninham was explaining why he just isn’t as cool as The Fonze. It reminded me of all the tedious discussions we were all having about optimisation about 4 years ago, about all the meaningless crap that was pumped out about finding the ‘optimum solution’. Finally we all (or at least the people I still talk to realised that our lives were too short to find optimum solutions to anything non-trivial, and what we really needed was improvement.

In optimisation the solution landscape was usually a pretty funny shape, nobody could really tell you what direction to search in, or what you’d find there, but with ‘zero carbon’-ness things are a bit more black and white. We know that all we need to do is to keep reducing the carbon footprint of whatever it is that we want to talk about and we’re onto a winner, right?

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Well this is where we run into a bit of a sticky point. Zero is a funny number, other than ? it is just about the most controversial number out there. This is all explained in Nothing: A Very Short Introduction, and The Book of Nothing amongst others. (Not to be confused with The story of O.)

So in our current context, what does 0 mean? This seems so simple until you think even a little bit hard about it.

“So my dinner is totally zero carbon dude!
I rode my recycled fixed wheel bike to the vegan grocery store, smoked an organic american spirit cigarette, and then got my veggies and rode home”

What’s up here? Our hero has cycled (no emissions), he’s bought vegan food (carbon positive probably, as the plants have taken up CO₂ while they were growing, and then ridden home. The hero’s cigarette could easily be thought of as carbon neutral, as the same amount of CO₂ was released by burning it as by growing it. Winner!

Ok, so this is a pretty dumb example, but it makes the cracks appear pretty quickly. The store had lights most likely, they will be using electricity, the veg needs to be tended and taken to the shop, probably using a fair bit of diesel. The cigarettes will have a whole load of associated things, think about the electricity used to light the adverts on billboards etc. This is one of those infinite regress situations, and sooner or later we need to find out if the person who sold you the cigarettes has ever bought fireworks, or had a coal fire at christmas. This can be taken to absurd levels, but it illustrates the point quite nicely.

This is the classic asymptote graph (the positive half). The right hand side is the part where we are talking about the shopkeepers shoe laces, and the left is where cycling to the shop instead of driving makes a big difference.

It would be very easy to throw up our hands and say that as we will probably never achieve we should follow the hedonistic route and do nothing, but as secretly we are motivated by glory and laziness (well at least I am!) we should do stuff now as we get the biggest effect for the least input – or more accurately we get more effect per unit of effort input.

So to tie this all up, lets not talk about aiming towards carbon zero, or how close we are to it, but rather how far we are from the baseline (lets be lazy and use the standard 1990 emissions level). How big are our reductions, how much have we improved by, not how close we are to an ambiguous target.

You can unload those thoughts now.