Green Wave Breaking
Green Wave Breaking
Sunday Star TimesClean and green? Not New Zealand houses, according to an international expert who says even our eco-houses are an embarrassment.
Down on Wellington's waterfront, a striking, glass-sheathed building with an undulating roof is taking shape. This may be the shape of the future.
The country's first "green" office building built from scratch, the Meridian Energy building will use 60 per cent less energy than conventional office buildings and 70 per cent less water.
Massive interior concrete slabs will absorb warmth from the sun, while a double "skin" of glass and external wooden louvres regulate temperature. With solar water heating and toilet cisterns that will be flushed with rainwater collected on the roof, the building is at the forefront of a coming wave of green commercial building.
Stephen McDougall, of the Studio of Pacific Architecture, says that when his firm began designing the Meridian building two years ago they had to educate many of those involved about why going green was a good idea.
"But since then we have noticed there is a groundswell of support for sustainable buildings across the board, from building owners, to tenants, contractors, subcontractors and suppliers," he says.
Paint suppliers, for example, are offering less toxic paints; upholstery suppliers are making fabrics from recycled coke bottles and carpet makers are offering recycled carpets.
While property investor Sir Robert Jones may think green architecture is a "fashionable inanity", others in the local building industry are piling on board the green bandwagon in surprising numbers.
One sign is the high levels of interest in a new "green star" rating system for buildings that has been on offer for four months by the newly formed New Zealand Green Building Council. The internationally benchmarked ratings are based on eight environmental criteria, including a building's energy use, water use, building materials and access to public transport.
The Meridian Building has gained five of a possible six stars under the rating system.
According to the council's chief executive, Jane Henley, developers have expressed an interest in gaining the ratings for more than 20 new buildings in design stages. Four buildings are going through formal registration, while two, including the Meridian building, have gained ratings. She says the property industry members who formed the council see sustainable architecture as a business opportunity.
"A green building has good paybacks," she says.
Government departments are helping fuel the trend. From this month new government office buildings have to get green star rankings.
But if our commercial sector has suddenly woken up to the planet, our residential sector is lagging far behind in providing housing that is environmentally sustainable.
Internationally renowned sustainable architecture expert Professor Robert Vale says he is "appalled" by the state of New Zealand's housing stock. And he says even New Zealand's most ecologically advanced houses are 40 years behind European cutting-edge eco-houses.
"In terms of energy efficient houses we are not very far along. It's pretty much where the Scandinavians were in the 1960s," says Vale, a research fellow at Victoria University's School of Architecture.
Vale should know. He and his wife Brenda, also a professor of architecture at Victoria University, have been at the forefront of green architecture in the UK and in 1993 designed what Guinness World Records has called the most energy-efficient house in Britain.
They also designed the Hockerton Housing Project, a sustainable settlement of zero energy houses in Nottinghamshire completed in 1998. It won a 2001 award for the best solar building in Europe.
Vale, who emigrated here with his wife 11 years ago, says the average New Zealand house is "scarily cold", badly insulated, has huge expanses of single-glazed glass, and is a nightmare to heat. When they packed their bags to move here they were expecting an environmentally advanced country. Instead they found a country with little interest in sustainability.
"It's not what we expected, with New Zealand's clean green image and the anti-nuclear thing," he says.
Not only that, but he has found that even New Zealand's cutting-edge eco-housing houses that are supposed to use little energy are an eco-embarrassment.
He points to 17 houses that are being promoted as paragons of energy efficiency on the Building and Research Association of New Zealand's website.
These are "Zero and Low Energy Houses", known as the ZALEH project for short. But they are anything but low energy.
More than two-thirds of the houses actually use more energy than the average New Zealand home. One house uses a staggering 57,000kWh of energy each year, more than five times as much as the average New Zealand home's 11,000kWh a year.
The three-bedroom Lyttelton house, which is a sprawling 330 sq m, uses little electricity but more than 53,000kWh worth of firewood each year.
Another of the 17 houses is billed as a "zero" energy house. And yet it uses an LPG heater and a log burner with wetback. Only two of the houses meet what is considered in Europe to be a low-energy house a house that uses less than half the energy of an average house.
"I think there's an enormous timidity in the residential sector in New Zealand, when you see in Germany they're already commonly building houses that produce more energy than they consume," says Vale.
"You use photovoltaic roofs and connect them into the electricity grid so the house basically becomes a power station. There are whole housing estates in Germany that do that," he says. "There aren't even zero-energy houses in New Zealand. It's so easy to make a zero-energy house. Why would you want to pay to keep a house warm when you could do it for free?" he asks.
And he thinks New Zealanders' failure to warm to solar heating, in comparison to Britain, is bizarre given our climate.
"The ease of doing it in New Zealand is much greater, because there's more sun and less cold. The coldest bits of New Zealand are warmer than the United Kingdom and definitely sunnier," he says.
Vale's own house on Waiheke Island, which is an older house they refitted with extra thick insulation, reglazing, and solar panels, uses only about 1000kWh a year more than it generates.
The couple put electricity into the national grid during the day, and take it back at night when they need it for cooking and other purposes. But putting electricity into the grid is so rare in New Zealand that by mistake Mercury Energy initially charged the couple for the electricity they were generating.
But all this isn't cheap. The Vale's refit of their home cost $40,000 for the solar panels, and as much again for insulation and the latest type of double glazing, which is similar in effect to triple glazing.
Vale gets annoyed though at those who ask what the payback time is. "If you install a $50,000 kitchen in your house with granite benchtops nobody ever asks about the payback," he says.
BRANZ, the organisation showcasing the 17 zero- and low-energy houses that are in fact mainly energy hogs, concede Vale has a point.
"Some of the ZALEH houses were `high' consumption. It is important to note that the ZALEH houses were not selected specifically as low-energy houses. The ZALEH houses were required to have some energy-efficient features or technologies," said science communications manager Chris Kane.
"Most provide a very good level of service for the energy they use, although that consumption may be high," he said.
And he claims few ordinary Kiwi families could aspire to the Vales' 1000kWh a year net energy use. The Vales "are extraordinarily low-consuming people, leaving a very small footprint on the earth almost irrespective of the technology they use, because of how they behave", says Kane. "Any house that the Vales live in instantly becomes a lower energy and lower water consumption house, even before any retrofitting or changing occurs, just because of their low-impact behaviour," he says.
Vale in turn says he is surprised about Kane's comments on how he and his wife live, given they have never met Kane. "Given that we have a TV, DVD player, stereo, iPods, mobile phones, electric heaters, cooking stove, computers, fridge-freezer, electric light, a car and all that sort of stuff, we are not actually behaving very differently from everyone else," says Vale.
There are encouraging signs, though, that BRANZ's so-called low-energy homes won't be the last word in green architecture.
Later this year the New Zealand Green Building Council is to develop a "green star" rating tool for residential developments, so home buyers will know whether they are buying an eco-home or an eco-disaster.
Next year the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority is due to introduce a Home Energy Rating Scheme.
And there are the first signs that major developers are moving into green building. Two property developers, Kensington Properties and Stonewood Homes, are leading the way in "mainstreaming" green features in new subdivisions.
Kensington Properties' Patrick Fontein, who is also chairman of the NZ Green Building Council, says developers who haven't woken up to the coming green architecture wave "are dumb, really".
"Why would you not make your house as green as you can?" he says.
In the next year his firm plans to build 200 energy-efficient homes in new subdivisions in Orewa and Taupo.
The first four homes, due to be finished in Orewa in the next couple of months, are expected to save 60% on their electricity bills. Auditing of the homes by Meridian Energy, who is partnering Kensington Properties, projects annual electricity bills will be just $800, instead of the $2000 that would normally be expected.
According to Meridian Energy, the four homes will use just 4450kWh of energy each, less than half the national average. And that is despite the fact they will be bigger and warmer than the average Kiwi house.
The energy-efficient homes will have solar panels for water heating, be insulated to two or three times the level required by the building code, have energy-efficient heating, appliances and lighting, and have "low-e" double glazing (which is similar in effect to triple glazing).
The green features add an extra 5% to the cost, or around $30,000 for a $700,000 home.
"The challenge is to reduce the cost to $20,000 or $10,000," says Fontein.
And in Canterbury, Stonewood Homes has already built a couple of dozen houses in a new subdivision of what will be 200 "Eco Sure" homes with higher environmental specifications. The Rangiora homes will include extra insulation, a higher standard of double glazing than required, locally produced plantation timber, solar heating, energy-efficient appliances, low-flow taps and heat pumps.
The houses cost no more than other Stonewood homes, because of savings made elsewhere.
Director Tony Anderson says few other builders appear to be following their lead yet, and instead have their heads down building flat out the way they always have.
He says the next step for the company is to rethink its architecture to deliver more energy savings, using passive heating principles. Typically that means using concrete slab floors to absorb heat from the sun during the day, with insulation and double glazing trapping the heat.