Sustainable Building - Obstacles and Opportunities
By David A. Bainbridge
Associate Professor
United States International College of Business
Alliant International University
San Diego, CA 92131
The goal of the sustainable building movement is to improve comfort and
health of the built environment while maximizing use of renewable
resources and minimizing life-cycle costs. The life-cycle savings
are particularly important for institutions which cannot count on
increasing income in the future to offset large increases in cost for
energy, water or other resources. Comfort and health, energy and water
use, waste, recyclability, and cost are key issues. Systems considerations
are critical in the building design and operation. We know a lot, so why
are buildings so uncomfortable, costly, expensive to maintain, energy
wasting, unhealthful and ugly?
A system of perfectly perverse incentives* encourage almost
everyone in the development process to do the wrong thing. Small but
important signals and incentives make it most profitable for the
designers, builders and installers to make inefficient, costly and
unhealthful buildings. This has been compounded by poor training in
schools, both architecture and engineering, lack of training for builders
and government subsidies that artificially reduce the cost of energy,
water, and building materials.
Ten key problems include:
1) Dominance by the developer rather than users or clients. The
developer is usually forced into making minimal first cost the key goal --
without considering life cycle costs, health, comfort and productivity.
Speculative building also leads to universal averages that will work with
a wide range of users - but don't fit anyone well. Building owners often
pass all energy costs to leaseholders - and feel little pressure to
improve efficiency.
2) Failure to consider system integration. The lighting engineer
may design lighting for minimal installed cost, without considering
possible use of natural daylighting (determined by the architect's window
choices) or the cost of cooling to offset lighting heat (90% for
incandescent lights). The architect may design the building without
consulting the mechanical engineer about the implications for natural
heating and cooling or daylighting. And user comfort and productivity are
rarely an issue --- almost no post-construction analysis is ever done. Team
planning is essential to make buildings better and building users must
be included.
3) Minimal planning is often done by the land use planners, or more
commonly the engineers who determine the site plan. They often try to
minimize utility installation cost. This can severely limit options for
solar orientation and natural cooling.
4) Financing pressure is very intense and time lines can be very
tight, limiting time to think and explore alternative solutions. Financial
costing must be revised to include life cycle costs, over the 30, 50 or
100 years of use. Home mortgages in some countries are for 100 years -
this encourages competent and quality building.
5) Tax rules on depreciation and investment often encourage minimal
planning for energy and maintenance costs -- which can be passed on to
users. More efficient buildings with higher first costs tie up investor's
money for longer periods, reducing net income. Users are reluctant to
invest in efficiency improvements in buildings they don't own.
6) Incentives for minimal innovation are incorporated in percentage
based fees, common for architects and engineers. These are often fixed
percentages and encourage continued use of standard details or plans which
are average, acceptable but unoptimized. Moving to performance based
contracting can provide the proper incentives for innovation. With
performance based contract fees are based in part on actual savings.
7) Subsidized power and material costs (subsidies up to $45 billion
per year for non-renewable fuels have biased the market against renewable
energy) and separation of users from production costs encourage poor
design. A bad building may significantly increase peak loads in August at
*a term coined by Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute, Snowmass, CO,
the peak use period, this can cost $5,000-10,000 per kilowatt of
generating capacity, but the architect or engineer doesn't pay it, other
utility customers do. If energy costs reflected real costs electricity
might cost 2-4 times as much as it usually does today (perhaps 25-40¢ kwh),
climate resources would be an integral part of all designs. Even such
seemingly simple things as electrical wire size would be affected. Wire
diameter would be larger if energy costs were higher -- the current sizes
are chosen to prevent heating and fire risk not to minimize energy use or
life-cycle cost.
8) Liability fears are common in this litigious society. Engineers
may oversize equipment 3-5 times to avoid complaints, callbacks and
lawsuits.
9) Ignorance is the primary cause. Managers of homes and buildings
often assume the energy bill is fixed and immutable (perhaps in the
hundreds of thousands of dollars a year) while firing low paid maintenance
staff to save money (tens of thousands a year). Architects, engineers,
bankers and developers often have limited education on building
sustainability. Designs are often based on antiquated rules of thumb that
are no longer appropriate.
10) Poor operation and management are commonplace. If no-one
complains nothing may be fixed. Limited budgets and support from
administrators often make maintenance a low priority. Staff may be poorly
educated and commonly do not have access to monitoring equipment or
material needed for repairs.
Remarkable buildings illustrate what can be done by good design, including
a 500,000 square foot passive solar, sustainably designed Dutch bank. The
construction costs of the bank were the same as conventional construction
but it uses less than one tenth as much energy, absenteeism is 15%
lower, and the bank business has dramatically increased due to the
visibility and success of the building. Most buildings could realize
similar savings - San Diego buildings should require minimal cooling
systems and no heating systems, and they should all have operable windows
and natural lighting.
Productivity gains from improved working conditions often outweigh energy
savings 10-20 times. Revised lighting at a Pennsylvania Power and Light
drafting office reduced energy use enough to save only $2,500 dollars of
energy a year, but productivity increased more than 10%, the rate of
errors dropped saving more than $40,000 a year; and sick days declined
25%. The net return on investment was a striking 1,000%.
Performance contracting can offset many of the perverse incentives
that now exist. This new method of providing services to buildings inverts
the usually perverse incentives for waste and encourages the most
innovative and sustainable design. In the future the building developer
may contract with the utility for heating and cooling rather than
electricity and gas. It is then up to the utility to meet these demands in
the most cost effective manner. The design professionals may also be
working under performance incentives, with a base payment and then
continuing payments based on savings versus a conventional building's
average energy bill. Similarly, lighting can be contracted for and the
vendor provides lights and maintenance, so the most efficient and durable
lights are used and failed lights are returned to the manufacturer for
recycling. Even such simple components as carpet may be rented rather than
bought. BASF has developed a nylon carpet recycling program that makes it
possible to close the resource loop with their attractive and innovative
6ix carpets. For a fixed fee the carpet company may eventually be
responsible for providing carpet and replacing it as it wears.
Improved sensors and microcomputer management can markedly increase
performance of existing systems and pinpoint problems. These new sensors
also will make it possible to have readily visible meters. Improving the
market is among the best solutions and the least costly. Improving
technology is making it easier and easier to make the market work -
electronic meters for example will replace the mechanical meters on energy
and water and can make use visible - with a water and energy meter
integrated in each living room or bathroom.
WHAT WE HAVE TRIED:
- MASSIVE SUBSIDIES
- REGULATIONS
- MORAL PERSUASION
WHAT WE SHOULD TRY:
- TRUE COST ACCOUNTING
- INVESTMENT
- FREE MARKET
- EDUCATION
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