Footprint The housing sector is struggling to keep up with the ever-changing emissions standards, says Andrew Mellor

摘要

The recently revised definition of'zero carbon' for new homes announced within the Budget's Plan for Growth came as a shock to all of us who have been supporting the drive towards zero carbon performance from 2016. Most of us were not aware the announcement would be made, never mind what the content would be. The previous definition required mitigation both of CO_2 emissions associated with regulated emissions governed by the building regulations and of unregulated emissions associated with electrical appliance use. The revised definition will only consider regulated emissions, which are approximately two thirds of the combined unregulated and regulated total. We all knew the former definition was very ambitious. Under it, many new homes would simply not have been able to meet the target due to the inability to generate electricity from renewable technologies on site, owing to lack of space or other factors, such as overshadowing. PRP's research for the Zero Carbon Compendium, the worldwide comparison of low carbon housing produced for the Zero Carbon Hub in 2008, showed that the UK had planned the most ambitious residential energy performance targets in the world. With this change of policy, the UK will certainly slip down the rankings in the revised 2011 edition.