Woking is up there in the energy efficiency league. It has 10% of the UK’s total photovoltaic arrays, with solar energy used to provide heat and light for buildings and to power communal amenities, from street lamps to parking ticket machines. The town also has a programme for boosting building energy efficiency and its own “trigeneration power plant”. At times, the combination enables it to be 99% independent of the National Grid.
Visitors to February’s Ecobuild sustainable construction conference and exhibition were told all this and more about Woking by Allan Jones. He was one of the architects of the town’s environmental strategy and now, as chief development officer of the London Climate Change Agency, he plans to scale it up for the capital.
And Mr Jones’s presentation was just one of dozens during the two-day event, run at Earls Court alongside the new Futurebuild and Regenex conference-shows.
There was little doubt that this is set to become one of the key fixtures in the UK architectural and construction calendar. Sustainable construction and development are industry and government buzzwords and other keynote speakers included housing minister Yvette Cooper, local government association chair SIR Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, and Prince Charles’s favourite architect Quinlan Terry.
This stellar line-up no doubt helped pull in the audience, which reached 6,144 compared with 550 at the stand-alone Ecobuild in 2005. But the event’s appeal was also down to the fact that building sustainably is no longer just an aspiration for the construction sector – it’s a commercial necessity. The pressure is coming particularly from central and local government, with legislation, tax breaks and planning consent used to drive the sector down the environment-friendly track. But housing associations, individual consumers and businesses are also demanding new levels of green building.
Sense of urgency
The urgency with which the decision makers and opinion formers want construction to improve environmental performance was also evident at the conference. “It’s not something we should think about over the coming years, we must act now,” said Liz Reason of the Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB).
Every day, she said, the UK pumps 2 million tonnes of the key greenhouse gas CO2 into the atmosphere and the lion’s share of that is generated by buildings; either directly in the construction process or indirectly via the production of energy that’s wasted through poor insulation or inefficient heating and air-conditioning.
The AECB wants the industry to go further in improving energy efficiency than just implementing the revised Part L of the Building Regulations. It advocates a “silver standard” for builders that would cut the average annual CO2 output of a British house from six to two tonnes, and a “gold” which would reduce it to just 0.3 tonnes. “A realistic target will be to have 20,000 such low-energy buildings by 2010,” said Ms Reason
According to Professor David Strong of the BRE, the introduction of obligatory Home Information Reports in 2007 and energy certification for homes under the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive will add to the pressure on the construction sector. “These will have an impact on asset value and make architectural ‘greenwash’ more difficult,” he said. “The solution will be better quality and more intelligently designed buildings.”
Underlining the fact that the ‘greening’ of UK construction is here to stay, a whole industry is emerging to provide the products and services needed – and it’s growing fast. Last year the Ecobuild exhibition was a subsidiary event to the conferences and seminars, with just 40 stands. This year there were 200 and exhibitors included suppliers of everything from plant fibre insulation and solar panels, to water-economising taps and electrical systems for prefabricated housing.
Some felt that the timber and timber building sectors were not as prominent at the event as they might have been. As one timber trade visitor said: “Timber building is by definition sustainable building – wood is renewable and a natural insulator – so Ecobuild represents huge potential for us.”
Good interest for timber companies
That said, timber companies that did attend clearly made their mark, with most reporting good interest.
Wally Shaw, sales and marketing director of Covers Timber Structures, commended the show on attracting a “relevant audience”. “We’ve seen architects, contractors housing associations, local authority representatives and developers,” he said.
Covers’ focus was its new relationship with Canadian timber construction specialist Corecan which will bring the latter’s energy efficient designs to the UK. “We’re targeting multiple unit developers and particularly housing associations,” said Mr Shaw. “And we’re optimistic about prospects. Demand for sustainable housing is a snowball that’s going to become an avalanche.”
The Canadian timber and timber construction industry as a whole also saw the Ecobuild audience as worth targeting. The Canadian Housing and Mortgage Association and High Commission used their stand to promote Canada’s Super E. housing programme and the CSA forestry and timber certification scheme.
“Since its approval by the UK government’s CPET body, the CSA scheme is better recognised here,” said Canadian forest certification consultant Kathy Abusow.
Certification was a focus for Arnold Laver too. Its stand comprised a section of a house, cut away to reveal a range of its products, from joinery, sheet materials, flooring and cladding, to shingles and decking. A feature was made of the certification stamps on the items, with Laver supporting the five main schemes present in the UK market: FSC, PEFC, SFI, CSA and MTCC.
“The interest in timber among this audience is tremendous,” said group purchasing director Pat Burke. And the demand for information on certification, he added, Laver may launch its own presentation programme.
Among the products on show for boosting building energy efficiency was the Supply Air Window from Howarth Timber (Windows & Doors) Ltd. Developed in association with Dwell-Vent Ltd, this was billed as a heat-reclaim device. Air flows into the vents at the bottom of the window and warms between the low-E coated panes before being delivered into the house at the top. The design has a very low U-value, and can cut heating bills by 20%. “To improve energy performance, construction is moving toward sealed buildings, but many people are not keen on mechanical ventilation,“ said Mike McEvoy of Dwell-Vent. “Our system is totally passive.”
Richard Daley, managing director of structural insulated panel manufacturer Hemsec SIPs, said attending the show was justified in the first two hours, describing visitors as “serious players”. He added that Hemsec plans to significantly increase current production of 1.3 million m2.
Ecobuild was also a hit with housing system suppliers, including Wave the timber panel build partnership between social housing and regeneration business Riverside Group and architectural consultancy Avebury. It highlighted the increasingly broad range of buildings it is developing with its timber panel construction system.
“We’re now looking increasingly at multi-storey, including a building comprising two storeys using cement-based construction, with five timber frame storeys above,” said Avebury’s Richard Haynes.
Pinewood Structures flagged up its success in winning a contract for 15 homes from SmartLIFE, the government-backed scheme aimed at developing sustainable modern methods of construction housing. Pinewood’s Paul Duffin was disappointed there were not more contractors at Ecobuild, but said: “There is clearly a lot of buoyancy in the market”.
