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There are so many facets to the environmental cause that choosing one subject has turned out to be a really difficult task, I have so many soap-boxes.  How do we reconcile living in a capitalistic society, that is geared up for consumerism, but at the same time encourage the “reduce, recycle, reuse” mentality?

How do we get people out of the most polluting cars when the car makers and government are not seriously supporting attractive alternatives?

What about electricity generation?  Can we get enough clean electricity to close down the most polluting power stations?  Can we do it without nuclear power or reshaping the environment, or destroying precious habitats?

How do we meet the British aspiration to be a home-owner by providing enough housing, but doing it in an environmentally sensitive way?

Housing
Since it is the great British obsession, I will focus on housing.  In the past 10 years, developers have sought to grab land for redevelopment at an alarming rate.  I live in the South-East, and I see houses disappearing and reappearing with blocks of “executive apartments”.  Just today, diggers have moved in down my road to raze a house to the ground.

Urban and suburban areas are interesting places:  on the one hand, they bring efficiency.  You can more easily concentrate services around a dense population than a sparse population.  Public transport, walking, and cycling become more feasible forms of transport.

But on the other hand, dense building takes away nature’s safety net against pollution and over-heating, and, as we have seen this summer, concrete is not very good at letting water drain away.  Just last week the Met Office published a report saying that the atmosphere is become more humid, and with humidity comes rain, and with heat comes extreme storms, the like of which you see in the tropics.

The reality of living in Britain is that there is not enough land for everyone to have a house in the countryside.  Town living is the practical reality, but we must find a way to reduce the impacts of our towns on the environment.

When Gordon Brown became Prime Minister he aired the idea of creating eco-towns – brand new towns built on spare government owned properties.  The fact of the matter is, however, that these eco-towns just scratch the surface of what is needed.  The real issue is what to do with existing housing, or the redevelopments that happen down the end of your street.

Beyond double glazing, better insulation, switching to energy efficient appliances and switching to a green electricity utility company, there may be little that can be done with existing housing, but we can install solar panels.

Solar
Installing solar panels, however, can be expensive. We need real incentives to get us producing more of our own energy.  The current situation is that it can take 20 years to recoup the expense of installing solar panels.  Once you’ve got your solar panels, you are then at the mercy of the utilities for the price you get for your excess electricity, of even if they will take it at all.

In Germany it is very different.  There the payback period is less than 10 years.  Not only are there better subsidies for installing solar panels, but the utilities are obliged to buy your excess electricity at a guaranteed rate.  Imagine all the roofs in Britain, all facing the sky, all collecting electricity.  Modern solar panels do not need to have direct sunlight to produce electricity, they can generate electricity from ambient light.

Redevelopment
What of redevelopments?  They are such a missed opportunity.  Since most redevelopments now result in multi-occupancy buildings there really is little scope for post-development energy improvements.  The real opportunities rest with the developer.

You’ve got the diggers in, why not dig some trenches, while you’re at it, and lay some pipe-work for a ground source heat pump?  With the ground source heat pump you can provide heating for the new house without any fossil fuels.  The energy used to power the pump can be drawn from the solar panels. Additionally, the beauty of ground source heat pumps is they can act in reverse.  In the winter you use the ground heat to heat the home, in the summer you can take the heat from the home and pump it into the ground.

While you’ve got the digger out, why not install rain collectors underground to run the lavatories and washing machines from?  Surely, they don’t need drinking quality water?

If you’re building more than 50 apartments you should really be thinking about a Combined Heat and Power unit running off biomass.  The new development then becomes self-sustaining for its electricity and heat, and may even produce enough to sell back to the utility company, or to sell to other nearby properties.  It may even sell enough to reduce the maintenance cost of the buildings.

Flat roofs: just why are they not green?  There are so many benefits with green flat roofs.  They reduce the ambient temperature, they insulate, they slow the run-off of water, and they encourage biodiversity.  If you install solar panels on a green flat roof they also work more efficiently because they can operate at a cooler temperature, which is better.

These are simple measures that local authorities can impose on developers.  The cost of installation is not prohibitive if done at the right time, but the benefits are long lasting, and ultimately attractive to buyers.  What home-buyer out there would not be attracted by the home that has free heating?

Mark Sharp (Editor)