An interesting meeting this morning with planners. They have the age old problem with implementing their new renewables policies because of the detachment between the development teams and the ultimate building user.
The problem goes something like this; A developer and his architect come up with a great idea to build something that will make some money. As most developers (not this one mind) are closet or actual accountants at heart and their consultants (not this one mind) generally fall in to line for the sake of an easy life the mindset is about money before doing the right thing. Planners don’t have the same commercial pressures but ultimately they can only push so far unless a policy is sufficiently robust enough to resist pressure to make it cheap.
But now we about to be on the horns of a dilemma. Green policy is becoming robust, and in the authority in question they now require all schemes with more than five dwellings to be built to Code 3* and all types of schemes to generate 10% of energy on or near site. This is designed prevent casual offsetting and buying a green solution off the shelf from a fly-by-night carbon trader. So an impasse is forming and it will need some refusals or a viable solution to break it down.
The obvious way to break this down is through the needs of the end user of the building. If we consider what drives most occupiers, whether they are commercial, public or domestic, we come to the inevitable conclusion that money makes the world go around**. Most people want to be green too, but it isn’t what they do for a living and we need to have a way that they can be environmentally credible with the least amount of effort.
Business models should cater for that and provide solutions that work for the end user because if it is attractive to them financially and environmentally then developers and architects will simply have to go with it to remain competitive. It will become as second nature as putting doors in walls.
* Housing Associations / RSL’s are already heading towards Code 4 standards. Private residential schemes aren’t obliged to build to anything much at the moment, so it usually doesn’t.
** I know, I know, we aren’t all money orientated but we can’t deny the bare facts of human nature the world over. We don’t have to change human nature, we just have to find a way of dealing with it.
From the Council’s website:
Funding
Most of the funding will come from Urban Splash as the Developer. However, the public sector will contribute the following:
Transform South Yorkshire, the Government’s Housing Market Renewal Agency is providing £13m to cover enabling costs, including homeloss payments to residents, security and the demolition of non listed buildings and to contribute towards the gap funding needed to make the project viable.
The Homes and Communities Agency (formerly English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation) is providing £14m for gap funding and £10m to provide 200 units for rent and 40 for shared ownership. Parkway Housing (MMHG) will also contribute £10m to this.
English Heritage is providing £0.5m for specialist concrete repairs.
So to round that up the total of public funding at the time of publication=
£13m Transform South Yorkshire
£24m HCA
£10m Parkway housing (Manchester Methodists)
£0.5m English Heritage
£47.5m Total
I’d been toying with thoughts of my Shirecliffe Hub and spoke being a kind of Wicker Man (geddit?) and so while checking the various interpretations of the Colossus of Rhodes and more modern interpretations like the Angel Of The North. Today I came across an item on the BBC website about the unbuilt Brick Man devised by a then unknown Anthony Gormley back in 1988.
Two decades have passed since Leeds was arguing about making a national impact by creating a giant brick man towering over Holbeck. The figure by, the then little-known, Antony Gormley was planned to be around 120 feet tall, his design for the brick man won a competition between 20 artists. The brick man was never built. The sculpture would have been around half the height of the Town Hall (for a long time Leeds’s tallest building). For a more recent comparison the newly-built Bridgewater Place is around three times the planned height of the statue. Would Leeds have loved the man? If completed brick man would have been the largest sculpture in the UK at the time, and expected to cost £600,000 in 1988. The plan was for the man to be hollow inside, with a ground-floor entrance in one heel and two tiny windows in the ears, the public would be able to enter the foot to contemplate the scale of the interior.
However, public and political opposition combined with planning wrangles meant that the scheme was eventually scrapped. Opposition to the scheme included a vote conducted through the Yorkshire Evening Post (a phone poll revealed 800 people for the figure but more than 2,000 against it). The then Leeds City Council leader, Coun George Mudie said of the anti voters “Their common sense contrasts sharply with the airy-fairy views of celebrities who don’t live within 100 miles of the city.” in the cash-strapped 1980s (sound familiar?) it was felt money could be spent better elsewhere. And Leeds was a very different place back then.
Speaking to BBC Radio Leeds in 2009 George Mudie is un-repentant.
“People needed the help and I thought at the time it was a luxury and the wrong priority for the times.”In the 80s we had Thatcher, we had industries, engineering, clothing, all disappearing.
Those were the priorities. The brick man didn’t fit with the priorities.In the 90s we might have had enough resources to take a different decision.”In 1988 Conservative Councillor Richard Hughes-Rowlands said: “If Mr Gormley is talking about it (brick man) going somewhere else, my eyes won’t exactly be weeping tears.
“Ten years later it did – another Gormley creation, Gateshead’s Angel of the North finally towered over the A1.In the 21st century it is perhaps seen as a missed opportunity, maybe the city of Leeds was too timid, or money too tight. Since the brick man decision some large-scale public art projects elsewhere have become much appreciated.
You can still see a maquette (or model) of the brick man, made by Gormley in 1986, on display in Leeds City art gallery. The brick man was cast from life with the artist being covered in plaster.The maquette is featured in the entrance of Leeds City Art Gallery and features as one of the gallery’s top 10 exhibits. It still draws many curious, or regretful, glances.
The Maquette is pictured on AG’s website . We can only wonder at how this would have turned out.
http://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/chronology-item-view/id/2057/page/481
Zenith Solar have launched their new installation in Israel – it’s an amazing technology for the right location and there is talk that the array in the Negev desert could soon supply 20% of Israel’s electricity from units which are scalable and track the sun.
The concept of Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) systems is to use low cost optics to increase the light incident onto the very high efficiency semiconductor solar cell material, thus reducing overall cost of the system while increasing energy output. The concentration factor, denoted by X, is a measure of the increased light intensity on the semiconductor cell. X equals approximately the area of the optic collector divided by area of the semiconductor solar cell. ZenithSolar system is designed to a concentration factor of 1000 X. The ZenithSolar optical dish is based on a patented design, utilizing multiple simple flat mirrors mounted on a plastic surface. The molded plastic surface, divided into four quadrants, is fixed onto a rigid, high precision metal frame assembled onto an azimuth – elevation solar tracking system.
The concentrated solar radiation is reflected from each individual mirror onto an array of solar cells. ZenithSolar uses field proven high efficiency multi-junction III-V solar cells. In conventional CPV systems, the excess heat generated in the solar cell needs to be removed to avoid damaging the cell and to maintain high efficiency of electricity conversion. ZenithSolar utilises the heat generated at the solar cell receiver to provide usable hot water heating, improving overall solar power conversion efficiency to 75%
I just heard an interesting piece on Radio 4’s More Or Less with Tim Harford. David MacKaye of Cambridge University was talking about his book – Sustainable Energy – Without The Hot Air that deals with a mathematical analysis of the joys of the various renewables that are being touted. There was food for thought on the numbers especially wind power (worse than useless) and surprisingly nuclear.
The response by Rebbecca Willis of the government’s independent Sustainable Development Commission was quite dismissive, saying that you can’t distill it down to numbers. Since I’m something of a number anorak I’m not so sure that we should dismiss the numerology quite so quickly – it deserves more study so I’ll have to get stuck in to the book. There is always a danger that the time and effort invested in creating monolithic policies become more important than adapting to the changing reality.
But, it’s nice to know that leaving a mobile phone charger plugged in only equates to 1 second of driving!
