Personal Reflections on Energy & the Built Environment

Week 12 Reflections  “The Problem with Net-Zero Buildings (and the Case for Net-Zero Neighborhoods)”  by Nadav Malin The author seems critical of the concept of net-zero buildings and argues that low-rise building, spread on a large site (urban sprawl) could be made with more ease into a zero carbon building through the use of PV panels. Whereas this would be much harder to achieve with a high-rise building, where the roof area for PVs is significantly less. I do not entirely agree, as PV technology advances in a very fast pace and PV panels can also be mounted vertically on the façade. However, another important aspect to look at is urban sprawl. In less dense areas, where buildings are generally lower, the PV systems are most efficient because the roof area is maximized and overshadowing is minimal. For urban areas with high-rise buildings the opposite holds true. But while lower and spread buildings have better conditions to become net-zero energy buildings, they ...

Week 11 Pre-Session Reflection Integrated Waste Management Facility, Hong Kong http://www.epd.gov.hk/epd/english/environmentinhk/waste/prob_solutions/WFdev_IWMF.html This was a project that I had been working for half a year from Jan 2017 to Jun 2017. The site is located in Shek Kwu Chau, an island that is distanced from metropolitan Hong Kong. The site area is around 100.000sqm. The client of this project is Hong Kong government's Environmental Protection Department, who hired Keppel Seghers, an integrated waste management specialist, as their sub-contractor concerning the operation of the facility. While there is no doubt that building this facility would be much better than sending waste straight to landfill, I still have some concerns and criticism. Although some materials like plastic and metals are recovered and recycled, a lot of the waste is actually managed through a very large boiler (180m heigh and 18 radius), where it is processed, burned and then later energy i...

Week 10 Pre-Session Reflection: Individual reflections on the article  "Passive House Standards Make Net-Zero Easier"  by Steve Hansen Passive House will aims to reduce a building’s energy consumption by up to 90% where the rest of the energy required is to be provided by renewable energy sources, thereby effectively resulting in a zero-carbon building. Recently, in 2015 Passive House launched two new certification standards, namely Passive House Plus and Passive House Premium. These new standards have higher performance benchmarks with lower energy consumption and energy generation (on site and off-site). Typical Passive House strategies that reduce energy consumption include: high level of insulation triple glazing airtight envelope with minimal thermal bridging heat recovery ventilation system solar generation through PV system (energy surplus fed into grid) ground source heat pump for hot water and heating demands Post Session Ref...

Week 7 & 8 summarised Reflections Week 6 Pre-Session and In-Session Reflections: Assignment 2.1 Group Work As a group we have collaboratively decided to design a rating tool for the user comfort in public libraries. When we were trying to define our scope there was contention among certain group members where some wanted to include conventional parameters that related to the overall energy consumption of libraries (such as energy use, water, waste, etc.), and other wanted to limit the scope exclusively to parameters which defined user comfort such as aesthetics, biophilia, user-friendliness, furniture, etc. However, after some internal discussion we reached the consensus that we would limit our scope only to the parameters that directly influence user-friendliness, as conventional building performance criteria (such as water, waste, electricity), were already extensively covered my major rating tools such as LEED, GBCA, etc. Furthermore, the entire team worked collabo...

Week 5 Pre-Session Reflection: Individual reflections on the article "Benchmarking building performance: what can we learn from LEED?" In the article the author is highly critical of the Green Star and LEED rating systems. He also sheds light on their limitations as well as emphasizing that their absolute implementation in the built environment is still relatively small. Just like the Green Star system, LEED is mainly used in commercial projects, and only influenced 4% of newly built up space since its conception in 1993. Out of these 4% only 6% were certified as LEED Platinum. There are, however, several limitations with the LEED rating system: LEED does not take into account the transport of “sustainable materials, LEED ratings are also awarded on the basis of “Design” and “as built”, but fails to take into account “in operation.” This is a significant shortcoming, as most buildings that were LEED cerittifed in the design or as built stage, do not match up to t...

Week 4 Pre-Session Reflection Personal reflections on the article “ Are We Ready for Zero Carbon Buildings ?” When we think about zero carbon buildings, it is important to look beyond how a building generates at least the same amount of energy on site as it used. Embedded carbon, and low embedded carbon materials, such as timer, could be important considerations. It is also evident from the article that in many countries, there have been two major constraint that have caused an impediment towards making zero carbon buildings more common – cost and our existing attitude. Personally, I believe the solution is quite obvious. On an individual level, the attitudes of investors, home owners, developer and builders need to change and they will as zero carbon building will make more and more economic sense when our electricity bills are increasing, there is a greater prospective return of investment. I believe, however, that on a legislative level the state and government also ne...