Why being 'ready' for net zero carbon is going to cost you a fortune and not save us from drowning
The planet is going to 'COP' it if we don't do net zero carbon properly. And you are paying the bill.
TLDR: ‘Net zero carbon ready’ is essentially business as usual for the PLC builders, because they simply don’t care, and you will be poorer in every sense.
Last weekend I was asked to speak at a virtual event called ‘Countdown to COP’, organised by the very nice folks at Transition Chesterfield. Click on the link to read the summary of the event, and a handy list of what councils can do to save us from oblivion (I’ll cover this properly in part two of this piece, snappily titled: “Why councils really need to start joining up the dots between their climate emergency declarations and how they actually operate”).
COP refers to COP26 - the big how we are going to save the planet by not doing anything like enough to save the planet event, scheduled for Glasgow later this year.
Covid permitting, this will involve lots of political folks flying in from all over the world to talk about how they won’t be doing enough but we will try to convince people we are. Hopefully the irony of that isn’t lost on you….
But I digress.
So here’s the good news - by 2050 we are all going to create the ‘net zero’ carbon society we need if our kids are going to be able to breathe!
How do we know this?
Because the Government is going to make sure, as part of its Green Industrial Revolution, that all new homes are ‘net zero carbon’ ready from 2023. Hurrah!
The Green Industrial Revolution is a £12bn Government investment to unleash innovation and create 250,000 jobs across the country, powered by wind turbines and electric vehicles (it says 'ere)
PM Johnson said:
“We’re radically improving the energy performance of new homes through our Future Homes Standard - ensuring all new homes are highly energy efficient with low carbon heating, making them zero carbon ready by 2025.”
The Government is, let’s be fair, doing a hell of a lot to tackle climate change. Compared to most countries, this is impressive stuff.
And don’t forget that councils up and down the land have declared a CLIMATE EMERGENCY - double hurrah!
Problem solved then. All good.
Hang on though. Time to get under the hood and ask a few awkward questions.
I’ll tackle the whole climate emergency/ councils saying one thing and doing another next time (short version: Mostly hopeless, must do better, honourable exceptions apply).
For today, let’s focus on the question the greedy bosses of the PLC housebuilders are currently asking:
“So how do we cheat the new rules, so we don’t have to actually try harder?”
Luckily the Government is on hand to help out here, with the nifty phrase:
‘NET ZERO CARBON READY’
This is the Government’s big claim for its Future Homes Standard. Fundamentally, FHS is a good thing - the first serious attempt to improve this country’s criminally low building standards in far too long.
But of course nothing is beyond the pale for our wonderful PLC creators of noddy box could be anywhere estates.
For this, we need to consider a typical PLC developer new house. For argument’s sake, let’s call this hypothetical house ‘the one my sister lives in, built by Persimmon in the flightpath of Gatwick airport’.
This in fact, on the giant Forge Wood estate:
Nice huh? Three bed detached, a snip at £400,000 ish. Grass in the back garden a very definite extra (presumably whoever has the big rake was off that day, and nobody had the company kitty for pay for a £20 box of seed).
This built-as-fast-as-possible-to-the-lowest-standard-and-the-highest-price dwelling unit has a gas boiler, and an airtightness score of 6.5. This is a ‘fail’ according to Persimmon themselves, who set themselves a target of 5.
We know this because the results are included in this lovely box they give you when you move in:
(Presumably the cost of this is why they couldn’t afford any grass?)
Since Persimmon are famous for having no actual build standards, let’s help them out a bit by writing an honest covering letter for their lovely box:
“Sorry we couldn’t build your house to even this pathetically bad standard. We aren’t going to try to get your house to our target of 5, because, well actually we don’t need to, because the Government only requires us to hit 10 - yes, that’s higher than your brother’s 1950s house, but whatever - and more to the point, our dirty secret is that, just as with ALL the big builders, our way of doing things can’t produce a decent, energy efficient product.
“Anyway, here’s a ‘free’ bottle of washing up liquid, and some sachets of (cheap, obviously) coffee.”
The heating bill is going to be, what, £1,000 a year?
But IT’S OK PEOPLE - because despite the crappy build quality and planet destroying fossil fuel burning monster hanging on the utility room wall - this is….. drumroll…..
A ‘NET ZERO CARBON READY’ house.
Huh?
Because all this means, to the unscrupulous, is this: Just replace the gas boiler with an air source heat pump.
Actually no - that sounds hard and expensive. For the builder. So keep it even simpler and just wire the radiators straight up to the electricity (hopefully not literally, as that will kill you… although on second thoughts…..)
Because ‘net zero carbon ready’ is absolutely NOT the same as ‘net zero carbon’.
And this matters. A lot. Because ‘NZCR’ simply means replacing these:
With loads more of these:
‘Ready’ is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting here. The electricity grid is rapidly decarbonising - which is a wonderful thing we should all celebrate, and it means we are only a few years away from all our electricity being from renewable sources.
Gas of course is still largely sucked out of the North Sea bed or by criminals in Russia somewhere. So we simply take gas away from our homes, and/or use hydrogen instead, which is also ‘clean’ apparently.
To translate into housebuilding terms: A ‘net zero carbon ready’ house is simply one that doesn’t run on gas.
This is excellent news for shareholders of the PLC developers. But it’s very, very bad news for everyone else, and the planet.
So back to my sister’s house, and her £1,000 a year gas bill. Let’s pretend it’s now 2024, and gas boilers in new homes are now banned. My sister’s house is therefore all-electric. How much is she paying for her energy bills now?
For starters, electricity is a LOT more expensive than gas (perhaps better the other way round - gas is insanely cheap). If you just bang in electric radiators, then that £1,000 is now £3,500 to £4,000.
Ouch.
But wait! We can just install an air source heat pump (ASHP).
The Government wants 600,000 ASHPs installed every year from now until 2028. It’s Committee on Climate Change said 1.5m heat pumps need to be installed ahead of 2035 to stay on track for net-zero by 2050 (Committee on Climate Change) and they want to get cracking.
Only a few issues with that:
“Aiming to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 is also bold – only 30,000 were fitted last year… the government has not set out how it will achieve this target….poor-quality installations have undermined consumer confidence” (Times £)
And that’s assuming you can get hold of the things in the first place, and train enough people to install them, properly. Having a plan to do that, rather than just saying it’s something you want, sounds like a good idea. But hey, Governments huh?
I don’t want this to turn into a nerdfest about how heat pumps work (imagine a fridge working in reverse, and a zero added to the price tag for no good reason at all). But in simple terms they somehow kick out something like three or four times as much energy as you put into it. Sort of.
(No, I don’t understand how that works either, so let’s just call it magic).
Back to that gas/ electricity bill comparison earlier. So, if a unit of electricity four times the price of a unit of gas, but the ASHP magically converts that one unit into four units (stay with me), then…. eureka! The cost of heating your home remains at circa £1,000 a year. Right?
Wrong.
There are two reasons for this:
ONE - ASHPs don’t work all that well in the cold. That 4 to 1 ratio of magicness starts falling rapidly towards 1 to 1 as the temperature drops. Unfortunately this is generally when you will be looking to heat your home, it being winter and all.
TWO - problem one wouldn’t actually be that much of an issue - if you lived in a home build to a decent standard.
In my sister’s case, she doesn’t. She lives in something built by paid by the day subcontractors, churning it out as fast as possible for modern day robber barons….. which lands her with an airtightness score of 6.5.
6.5 means the house is full of cracks and holes where hot air gets out and cold air gets in (something to do with Newton’s law of thermodynamics or something, although I doubt he had Taylor Wimpey or Bovis in mind when he figured that out back in the day).
Those of us of a certain vintage will remember it was a legal requirement of every mum ever to make liberal use of two stock phrases, something along the lines of:
This house is lit up like a battleship
and
Stop heating the street
(The first makes NO sense! Why would you light up a battleship, unless you wanted someone to put a torpedo in you??!!!)
But ‘heating the street’ is exactly what you do when almost all of us turn the heating on. Because our houses leak. The Victorians couldn’t stop this happening, so made a virtue of it - air bricks, fires in every room, natural movement through the house etc. And of course just being colder.
Nowadays most of us want 21 degrees, no draughts and, presumably, terrible air quality as a result.
(We once sold a house to folks who wanted their house to be 30 degrees - you went in to do some snagging and came out exhausted and melting...)
So unless you build a better fabric - stopping up those little holes and cracks, and actively managing the flow of air - then you are simply setting up your ridiculously expensive reverse fridge to fail. You might be better off with a pile of £20 notes, burning in a Victorian fire.
And how do we do that?
Well, for absolute certainty, NOT by doing more of this:
You can’t build a house to a high eco standard out of bricks and mortar. Not if you want to build a lot of them, for a profit.
Instead, we need to start building houses the same way we build cars - on a high tech, quality controlled production line, under cover, in the dry, done by highly skilled people.
Check this out:
Nine houses, 98% finished, ‘installed’ in just FIVE days. All built in a factory. All in the top 1% in the country for energy efficiency. All sold for a similar price to the PLC noddy boxes up the road now going up.
The quality of these homes is amazing - we are really happy with them. As, more importantly, are our customers.
Imagine if you went into the dealership, to be told your new car will be slowly assembled on your drive over a nine month period, by people who don’t know each and don’t like each other… would you expect it to work perfectly from the off? No. Would you even consider buying it? Also no.
But that’s how we build houses. It’s NUTS.