Who was it built this house so ill
With shovel and with spade? Faust, Part II, Act V1
Argue with the executives of any industry which is failing to cut its carbon emissions, and they will say the same thing: it doesn’t matter, because they can pay other people to do it for them. This is how the European Emissions Trading Scheme works and, for that matter, how the rationing scheme I proposed in Chapter 3 will work. It is true that emissions trading is cheaper and more efficient than a system in which everyone has to achieve the same cut within their own businesses.
But while the delegation of responsibility works quite well – in theory at least – when the target for cutting emissions is unambitious, the bigger the cut becomes, the greater the number of industries which have to reduce their own pollution, rather than buy a clear conscience from somebody else. A 90 per cent cut across the economy means that every sector must cut its emissions by roughly that amount. If, for example, the carbon produced by land transport, which currently accounts for 22 per cent of our emissions, were to be reduced by only 50 per cent, emissions across the rest of the economy would have to be cut by 98.2 per cent. While I think I can show that 90 per cent is just within the realm of possibility, it is plain that 98.2 per cent lies well beyond it. If I am to make my proposals work, I must be able to demonstrate that a 90 per cent cut can be achieved not just in some sectors but in all those I cover.
I have made this task slightly easier for myself by examining only some parts of the economy. I have not tackled offices, the hospitality industry and public services, for example, because the solutions required in these sectors are quite similar to those explored in the following four chapters, and to sustain your interest I want to try to avoid repetition. I have examined the carbon-cutting potential of just a few of the many business sectors in the rich nations: if I tried to be comprehensive, this would be a very long book. But I have covered the activities responsible for over 60 per cent of our emissions, including some of those which are most difficult to redeem.
Perhaps my gravest omission is the military, whose use of fuel is – depending on how you look at the problem – either very hard to address or, on paper, very easy. The supersonic jet, for example, is possibly the most environmentally damaging technology ever developed. There will never be an eco-friendly F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. If planes like this continue to be deployed, they will destroy the climate as effectively as they destroy their targets. But I am among those who believe that our armed forces should be greatly reduced. The majority of them have no defensive purpose in the true sense of that term. Lacking convincing enemies – in the form of well-armed and aggressive neighbouring states – I believe that countries like the United Kingdom should confine their military operations overseas to peacekeeping: as much for the sake of the environment as for the sake of public finance and world peace. But I will excuse myself from further examination of this question on the grounds that it would require another book.
In this chapter I look at our houses and the extent to which their carbon emissions can be reduced by means of energy efficiency. I discover that the potential efficiencies are not as great as I had hoped, so in the following three chapters I explore the means by which the carbon content of the heat and electricity which our homes and the rest of the economy consume can be reduced. I seek to show that a combination of energy efficiency and new power-generating technologies will allow us to achieve a 90 per cent cut in emissions while keeping the lights and the central heating on. In Chapter 8 I look at how we might cut emissions from surface transport (on roads and railways) by 90 per cent, and in Chapter 9 I do the same for aviation. In Chapter 10 I explore the potential for a 90 per cent cut in two industries which produce a great deal of carbon dioxide: shops and cement. But I will begin by examining the peculiar problem of energy efficiency.
The commonest and most understandable mistake made by people engaging with the problem of greenhouse gas emissions is to assume that energy efficiency is the same as energy reduction. People imagine that if a piece of equipment uses 30 per cent less energy than the one it replaced, that 30 per cent has been saved. This was what I believed before I had the misfortune to encounter the Khazzoom–Brookes Postulate.
The postulate works like this. As efficiency improves, people or companies can use the same amount of energy to produce more services. This means that the cost of energy for any one service has fallen. This has two effects. The first is that money you would otherwise have spent on energy is released to spend on something else. The second is that as processes which use a lot of energy become more efficient, they look more financially attractive than they were before. So when you are deciding what to spend your extra money on, you will invest in more energy-intensive processes than you would otherwise have done. The extraordinary result is that, in a free market, energy efficiency could increase energy use.
It sounds ridiculous, and my instinct, when I first came across it, was to try to argue my way out. But the facts were not kind to me.
The postulate is named after two economists – Daniel Khazzoom and Len Brookes – who formed their theory in 1979 and 1980.2 But the effect was first noticed long before then. In his book The Coal Question, published in 1865, Stanley Jevons showed that cutting the amount of coal used to produce a ton of iron by over two thirds ‘was followed, in Scotland, by a tenfold increase in total consumption, between the years 1830 and 1863’.3 Since Jevons’s book was published, the world’s energy efficiency has improved by around 1 per cent a year.4 That shouldn’t be surprising. The steam engine Thomas Newcomen built in 1712 had an energy efficiency of 0.5 per cent;5 a good diesel engine today turns about 45 per cent of its fuel into useful work.6 But throughout that period, with the exception of a couple of small declines when energy crises pushed the price up, the world’s total consumption rose steadily. Between 1980 and 2002, energy use in the thirty richest countries rose by 23 per cent,7 even while they exported their most energy-intensive industries to poorer nations. There is some evidence to suggest that this happened because the cost of energy per service fell.8 The Khazzoom–Brookes Postulate appears to explain why the corporations, by pursuing their own cost-cutting interests, have not saved the planet.
I should point out that it remains, for now, only a ‘postulate’, and it is fiercely disputed by some energy experts. But I wish to try to make my proposals as watertight as possible, so I will assume that Khazzoom and Brookes got it right. If they are wrong, it does my proposals no harm. But if they are right and we ignore them, we are in danger of devising a scheme for reducing carbon emissions which does not work.
The postulate is similar to, but not quite the same as, the other great paradox of energy efficiency, which is known as ‘the rebound effect’. While the Khazzoom–Brookes works on the economy as a whole (the macroeconomic level), the rebound effect operates within your own pocket (the microeconomic level). If you live in a well-insulated house, you need burn less gas to maintain a certain temperature. But as your gas bills are therefore lower, you will be tempted to turn the temperature up. Car engines are far more efficient than they used to be, but over the past twenty years their fuel consumption has scarcely declined. The driver’s lower overall fuel costs permitted manufacturers to make cars bigger, heavier and faster and to make them do more: such as power steering, air conditioning and heating the windows.
The rebound effect isn’t, on the whole, as strong as the proposed macroeconomic impact. While the Khazzoom–Brookes Postulate suggests that energy use increases as a result of efficiency, the rebound effect merely ensures that energy use does not decline as much as it would otherwise have done.9 It is less controversial than the postulate.
These paradoxes are blissfully ignored by most environmentalists. In their book Natural Capitalism, for example, Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins – who in other respects are innovative and forceful thinkers – set out to
dispel the long-held belief that core business values and environmental responsibility are incompatible or at odds.10
One of the examples they use to show how energy efficiency could be good for both business and the environment is the way air transport is run. At the moment, in order ‘to monopolize gates and air traffic slots’, many of the airlines force passengers to fly to big airport hubs, and change planes in order to reach their eventual destinations. But if they used ‘smaller and more numerous planes that go directly from a departure city to a destination’, then ‘air travel would cost less, use less fuel, produce less total noise, and be about twice as fast point-to-point.’11
This, of course, is true. But if aviation is cheaper and quicker, more people will want to use it. The net effect is likely to be an increase in emissions. Indeed, they cite the good example of Southwest Airlines, which has increased its profits by turning customers around more quickly.12 It has increased its profits because, as a result of its efficiencies, it now handles more customers. Somehow they contrive to overlook this consequence.
None of this is to suggest that energy efficiency should not be pursued. But what the paradoxes appear to show is that in the absence of proper government policies, it is not just a waste of time: it is counter-productive. In January 2006, for example, the governments of Australia, the United States, China, India, Japan and South Korea launched what they called ‘the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate’. The partnership, which Australia and the US devised as an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol, differs from that agreement in that it sets no binding target for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Instead it relies entirely on developing and sharing new technologies designed to save energy and carbon.13 What the Khazzoom– Brookes Postulate suggests is that it cannot possibly work.
So here is another powerful argument for a rationing system. If efficiency is to work for us rather than against us, the amount of carbon the economy uses must be capped. And the only fair means of capping it is to give everyone an equal share. Only then does energy efficiency make sense.
When applied to houses, I believe I have discovered a third paradox: that regulation enhances the sum of human freedom. This was not a willing finding. I stumbled across it in the course of making another discovery: that my house is an ecological disaster.
In the two years since we bought it, I have slowly been finding out that there is scarcely a disease from which my house does not suffer. Neither the walls nor the floors are lagged, the windows rattle, there are gaps in the roof insulation nine inches wide, and the lights are embedded in the ceiling– which means that much of the electricity they use is employed to illuminate the underside of the floorboards.
The man we bought it from is a property developer. When he acquired it from the son of the old woman who died there, it was a ruin. He must have spent about £60,000 restoring it. Had he spent an extra £1,000, he would have cut my gas bills in half. Fitting the roof insulation properly would have cost him next to nothing. Solid wall insulation would have cost more, but part of the price could have been offset by using standard light fittings instead of the more expensive embedded ones. As he was ripping up the floors anyway, it would scarcely have hurt him to have rolled out a few strips of fibre.
But if we were to do what he should have done, we would need to gut the house all over again. The ceilings would have to come down, the floors would have to come up, the built-in shelves and cupboards would need to be ripped off the walls and we would have to decant ourselves into a rented home until the work was finished. It would cost us something like £20,000 to put right, and our efforts would add almost nothing to the value of the house. If we had it to spare, it would be better to pay someone to put a wind turbine on a mountain.
Ironically, we bought this house partly for environmental reasons: it is close to the town centre and well served by bicycle lanes and public transport, so we don’t need a car. It has plenty of natural light, and it is 100 yards from the nearest allotments, which means that I can grow zero-carbon vegetables. But because the energy choices of the developer were unrestricted, our choice was constrained. In my city, where the oldest houses are closest to the centre, there are almost no energy-efficient homes whose location allows you to live a low-carbon life.
Because he was refurbishing this house, rather than building it from scratch, the property developer was subject to building regulations which were both sparse and weak.14 Even those which did apply, as we have now discovered, were not enforced.
When a house is refitted to a high standard, the work should last for twenty or thirty years. During that time, with an average turnover in the United Kingdom of seven years,15 three or four households will live there. In other words, stricter regulations would constrain one set of people to do the work properly, and release three or four sets of people from the burden of living in houses which cost a fortune to heat. Even within an otherwise lightly regulated system of the kind carbon rationing permits, strict building rules would lead to a net increase in human freedom.
But the government of my country, still digging its ideological hole, insists that tougher rules would be ‘an unwarranted intervention in the market’,16 restricting people’s choice of how they lived their lives. When the Minister for Housing and Planning, Yvette Cooper, was urged to introduce proper energy efficiency standards for the refurbishment of houses, she said that it would amount to ‘unnecessary gold plating’.17 I remember that every time I read my gas bill.
It is partly because of this massive failure on the part of the state that our homes are responsible for such a high proportion of the energy we use. While the demand for energy in the United Kingdom rose by 7.3 per cent between 1990 and 2003, in our houses it rose by 19 per cent.18 Altogether they’re responsible for 31 per cent of the energy consumed here.19 Of that, 82 per cent is used for space and water heating.20 This has risen by 36 per cent since 1970.21
We use more energy to heat our homes partly because their average temperature increased, between 1991 and 2002, from 15.5° to 19°.22 This is a good thing: many people, especially the elderly, have been living in homes so cold that they pose a danger to human life. But it should have been easy to achieve this while greatly reducing the amount of heating we use. In fact, as I will be showing later in the chapter, there are houses which maintain an average temperature higher than 19° without any heating whatever. But in this country our homes act as warm air tunnels: they keep us warm almost incidentally, as the heat pours past us and into the street.
There are 17 million homes with cavity walls in the United Kingdom, but only 6 million with cavity wall insulation.23 Given that injecting mineral fibres between the bricks is so cheap that it pays for itself within two to five years,24 the 65 per cent of homeowners who choose not to use it must either be so poor they have no capital to spend, so poorly informed that they have never heard of the process, aware that someone else (the tenant) is picking up the heating bill, or perversely attached to burning money. In 2002, 10 per cent of homes still had no insulation of any kind – wall, floor or roof.25 This miserable circumstance gave rise to the best unintentional pun I have heard on the radio:
In the field of home insulation, Britain lags behind.
In 2004, the government said it was planning to oblige anyone extending a house to improve the heat-saving properties of the whole building.26 The logic was pretty clear: a bigger house, all else being equal, will lose more heat. By improving the insulation in the rest of the house, you would compensate for the effect of the extension. But this, alongside several other progressive measures, was dropped at the last minute, when the new regulations were published in September 2005. As Andrew Warren, the head of the Association for the Conservation of Energy, remarked,
the Building Regulations will be late coming into force, and have been substantially and deliberately weakened.27
Even the rules governing new homes, whose enforcement would cause far fewer political headaches, are feebler than the government originally proposed. While they were supposed to cut energy use by 25 per cent, now – even if they are enforced – the best they will achieve is 18 per cent.28 But both targets are pathetic.
Houses which meet the building codes in Norway and Sweden use around one quarter of the energy of houses meeting the standards in England and Wales.29 In fact, the building regulations in Sweden were tougher in 1978 than they are in Britain today.30 In Germany the air tightness standard – which determines how leaky a house is allowed to be – is three times as stringent as the standard in Britain.31
Even the feeble rules we do possess are mostly unenforced. The energy efficiency regulations were first introduced in 1985, but since then there has not been a single prosecution for non-compliance.32 This is not because our builders never break the rules. A study by the Building Research Establishment found that 43 per cent of the new buildings it tested, which had received certificates saying that they complied with the regulations, should have been failed.33 Professor David Strong, the head of the Establishment, observes that plenty of new homes have the requisite amount of insulation in their lofts, but quite often it is still tied up in bales, as the builders, knowing that no one would be checking, couldn’t be bothered to roll it out.34
One of the reasons for this is that the government has allowed builders to turn to the private sector to get their certificates. Whereas in the past only local authorities would enforce the rules, now you can pay an ‘approved inspector’ to certify the house. The inspectors compete for business, and the judgements they must make on energy efficiency, Strong points out, ‘are purely subjective’.35 The inevitable result is that they don’t want to be seen as too strict, or the builders will never use them again.36 It’s not only in the UK that this approach has proved to be a disaster. Even in Sweden there has been a decline in standards since the private sector started carrying out inspections.37
In fact it is hard to see what possible incentive builders have to comply with the energy efficiency rules. The chances of being found out are low, and when they are, they don’t get prosecuted. While the buyers of new homes are insured against other regulations not being met, no cover is provided for a failure to meet the energy requirements, so the builders have nothing to fear from the insurers either.38 It is cheaper to build houses badly than to build them well.
At the time of writing, the UK is being prosecuted by the European Union for failing to implement the new directive on the energy performance of buildings.39 Among the other sensible ideas the directive contains is an energy label for houses: when you buy one you are supposed to be able to see how efficient it is. But we already have a system a bit like this,* which is meant to be enforced by the building regulations. A study by researchers at De Montfort University found that 98 per cent of builders are failing to provide housebuyers with the information to which they’re entitled.40
The reason for all these failures is simple. David Strong says that the low standards are
the result of very effective lobbying in the UK from organizations… that have no desire really to change working practices or the quality of buildings they are constructing.41
There are some good builders in this country, but the government has sided with the bad ones. In doing so, it makes good building almost impossible. This is because, while the building regulations are ineffective at setting minimum standards, they are very effective at setting maximum ones. No builder, unless the client asks for it, will build a house that is better than the regulations demand.
What makes all this so frustrating is that even as the government was deciding which standard to apply, new buildings were being constructed that demonstrate a staggering potential for reducing the use of energy. The prototype is something called the Passivhaus (passive house), which was first developed in Germany in the late 1980s.
There is no single design for a passivhaus: from the outside it can be almost indisting uishable from other modern houses. But there is something odd about them that you notice soon after stepping indoors: they have no active heating or cooling systems.42 There are no radiators, no air conditioners, there is no need even for a wood-burning stove. The heat they require is produced by sunlight coming through the windows and by the bodies of the people who live there.
This sounds like a formula for misery, but a study of over 100 passive homes showed they had a mean indoor temperature of 21.4° during the cold German winter:43 higher, in other words, than the average temperature of houses in the United Kingdom. Even the unoccupied homes in the study stayed at 17°. In summer, the temperatures seldom rose above 25°.44
There is nothing magical about these constructions, and they rely on little in the way of innovative technology. The builders need only ensure that the ‘envelope’ of the house – the bit that keeps the weather out – is as airtight as possible, and contains no ‘thermal bridges’. A thermal bridge is material that conducts heat easily from the inside of the house to the outside. At every point – even where the walls meet the ground or the roof – contact with outside temperatures must be interrupted by insulating materials.
This doesn’t mean that the house should become a sealed box. Our slow but steady progress in stopping up leaks is one of the suspected causes of the rising incidence of asthma. Passivhauses have automatic ventilation systems which ensure that all the air in the house is changed once every three or four hours.45 They use a heat exchange system: the cold air entering the house is passed over the warm air leaving it, capturing about 80 per cent of its heat. (This uses energy, but far less than a conventional heating system.) To make this system more effective still, you can draw the fresh air through pipes in the soil,46 which in the winter remains warmer than the air, and in the summer stays cooler. The important feature is that the heat exchange systems are the only points through which air passes.
The windows are also important. In the northern hemisphere, they should be mostly south-facing and carefully matched to the size of the house: if they are too small, the house becomes too cold, too big and it gets too warm. They should provide about one third of its heating.47 To absorb more heat than they release, they need to be triple-glazed and super-insulated. The houses should also have a high ‘thermal mass’: the materials should be able to store heat, so that warmth absorbed from the sun during the day can continue to radiate at night.
Altogether, when fitted with efficient appliances, passivhauses should save around three quarters of the energy of an ordinary modern home of the same size.48 Remarkably, they are not much more expensive. The extra building costs should amount to 10 per cent of the total or less.49 A development of twenty homes in Freiburg, with a measured energy saving of 79 per cent, for example, cost just 7 per cent more than a typical building of the same type.50 Some designers say they have brought the extra costs down to zero.51 The reason why the costs remain so low, even though the building standards are higher and some of the materials (like the windows and the insulation) are more expensive, is that you don’t have to install a heating or cooling system.
If every house were magically transformed into a passivhaus by 2030 we would come close to reaching our 90 per cent target for the housing sector, even before we changed the sources of the remaining energy they use. Of course, unless we knocked down and rebuilt our entire housing stock between now and then (which would itself produce a tremendous amount of carbon), this cannot happen. But it is shocking to see how slow the uptake has been even for new homes.
There are now around 4,000 passive houses in Germany, 1,000 in Austria52 and a few hundred elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, with a couple of possible exceptions, they are confined to a development in south London by the man I attacked in the introduction, Bill Dunster. Happily, his architecture is more reliable than his claims about wind turbines. The Beddington Zero Energy Development (BedZed) he designed does have a heating system, but it uses just 10 per cent of the energy that ordinary buildings of the same size would need,53 and this is supplied by woodchips from trees pruned by the council.54 (When the chips are burnt they also generate some of BedZed’s electricity.)
Dunster has incorporated some clever features. The lagging for the hot water tanks, for example, is not wrapped around the tanks themselves, but lines the cupboards in which they sit. People can use the cupboards to air their clothes, while losing very little of the heat from the tanks. If they have been away and want to heat the house quickly, they can leave the vents in the cupboard doors open for an hour or two.55 He has also sought to save water (taking some of it from the roofs) and encourages people to use their cars as little as possible. The development incorporates offices (also built to the passivhaus standard), a car pool and walking and cycling schemes. Though every flat has its own garden, BedZed (which contains 99 homes and workspace for about 100 people) is as densely packed as developments in central London. Houses like this could be put up almost anywhere.
Like that of many other rich nations, the British government wants to see a massive number of new homes built – 1.2 million by 2016 – to accommodate the people desperate to escape from their families. It is hard to see why all these new homes cannot be built to passivhaus standards. Indeed if they are not, the housing sector’s contribution to climate change is likely to rise greatly by 203056 as – all else being equal – more homes means more energy. But the only thing that could encourage a widespread construction of low-energy homes is a set of building regulations that insist it must happen. This means setting a date for universal passivhaus standards – I suggest 2012 – and ratcheting up the building codes every year between now and then. This would provide a massive incentive for the construction industry to invest in some research and development and train its workers properly. At the moment, our builders get away with practices very similar to those which prevailed in 1900, when my own house was built.
If our governments refuse to attend to the building codes, they will vitiate not only any rationing scheme we might hope for, but also any meaning ful cap on carbon emissions. When people live in homes which are incapable of sustaining a low-carbon life, they will not tolerate an attempt to cut their emissions by 30 per cent, let alone by 90 per cent. A carbon cap without proper building regulations really does amount to a demand that people huddle around a smouldering log to keep warm.
But the problem of new housing is an easy one to solve – by comparison to the question of what we do with existing homes.
Few of the new homes being built in this country replace houses that exist already. While around 160,000 are going up in the UK every year, only 15,000 – 0.06 per cent of the total stock of 25.5 million – are knocked down.57 This means that it would take almost 1,700 years to replace the houses standing today. In 2005, Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute proposed that the rate be increased fourfold if there were to be any hope of meeting the more modest target (a 60 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050) set by the government.58 This attracted great controversy, not least among people who alleged that the carbon costs of demolishing and replacing these buildings would outweigh the carbon saved by more efficient homes. But something has to be done, because some 2 million of the houses here appear to be beyond cost-effective repair.* 59
There’s scarcely a clearer sign of the low priority given to energy-efficient housing than the complete absence of research into the energy costs of knocking down inefficient homes versus the energy costs of leaving them standing. The Environmental Change Institute’s report cites two papers to support its contention that
When an old, inefficient building is replaced with a new, efficient one, the… energy in the construction process will be offset within a few years.60
But neither paper says any such thing.* 61,62
Either way, we have to assume that the great majority of the houses standing today will still be standing in 2030, so most of the work, with all the difficulties this entails, will have to be done within existing homes. I’ve already suggested the means by which this might be achieved: building regulations governing their refurbishment. The rules would specify, for example, that if ever a floor were lifted, a wall rendered or a roof replaced, the restoration would have to be accompanied by insulation, the plugging of leaks and the sealing off of thermal bridges. While refurbishment will never bring our existing homes up to passivhaus standards, the government estimates its ‘technical potential’ for saving energy as between 40 and 42 per cent across the whole housing stock.63 This was described by the House of Lords, when it investigated these questions, as ‘relatively conservative’.64
Of course, an unintended consequence of much stricter rules governing the refurbishment of houses is that it could discourage any refurbishment at all, thereby ensuring that they remained even less energy efficient than they would otherwise have been. A carbon rationing system will provide a powerful incentive for refitting, but because of the expense it might be necessary to supplement it with some other measures. For example, governments could offer a rebate on stamp duty – which is the tax people must pay when they sell their homes – to cover part of the cost of restoration.65
In the UK, the companies which supply gas and electricity are obliged to spend some of the money they make on helping householders reduce their energy bills.†66 While it’s not clear whether this results in significant savings,‡ it’s quite a good example of an incentive which doesn’t cost the government anything. But, by comparison to programmes in other countries, our schemes are hopeless. Soon after Angela Merkel became Chancellor of Germany in November 2005, she announced that her government would be spending the equivalent of £1 billion a year to ensure that 5 per cent of the homes built before 1978 were refurbished to meet high energy efficiency standards: within twenty years every house in the country will be airtight and well-insulated.
A particular problem is the troubled relationship between landlords – especially private landlords – and their tenants. Because, on the whole, the tenant pays the electricity and heating bill, the landlord has no incentive to make the house and its appliances more efficient. For this reason, a rationing system could be grossly unfair on tenants: they might have a powerful incentive to improve the performance of their homes, but no means of doing so.
Various incentives have been proposed for encouraging landlords to improve their buildings, and the government has even introduced a tax break for them (they can set the costs of insulation against income tax 69). But I don’t think we need waste too much sympathy. Private landlords are already obliged to install various safety features (such as firedoors and fire escapes) before they rent out a home, and everyone recognizes that they should carry these costs. It seems to me that any home to be let should first pass a series of energy tests, and the landlord should be obliged to pay for the improvements.
However much we enhance the fabric of our homes, there’s a danger that the energy consumption inside them could keep rising. This is because of the explosive growth of electronic gadgets.
In the thirty-one years to 2005, the use of electricity for lights and appliances in our homes rose by 2 per cent a year.70 Houses now consume a quarter of the UK’s electricity. This is partly because we own more of every kind of technology (between 1990 and 2003, for example, the number of households owning video recorders rose from 59 per cent to 88 per cent 71), partly because our televisions, fridges and washing machines are getting bigger, and partly because there are more kinds of technology to own. While the efficiency of some gadgets – such as fridges and freezers – has greatly improved, others have become worse. A large plasma TV, for example, uses almost five times as much electricity as an ordinary model with a cathode ray tube.72 Until recently, telephones received all the electricity they needed from the few milliamps the phone companies send down the line. Now it is hard to buy one without both a battery and a plug.
Daftest of all is the electricity we use for no reason whatever: when our appliances are switched off. According to the British government, around one million tonnes of carbon emissions a year are caused by equipment in homes and offices left in ‘standby’ mode: plugged into the wall but not operating.73 This uses about 2 per cent of all our electricity.* 74 And the problem could become worse, as the digital decoders – or set-top boxes – for our televisions, which are rapidly becoming universal, are designed never to be unplugged.75
The only sector in which energy consumption has fallen substantially (by 15 per cent between 1990 and 2003 76) is cooking, and this is a false saving. Our meals require less energy to prepare only because they have already been prepared by someone else.
The table below gives a breakdown of our use of electricity in the home.†
In every one of these sectors, the waste of energy is scarcely believable. Compact fluorescent lightbulbs, which have been commercially
gadget |
electricity |
consumer electronics (TVs, computers, phones, etc.) |
10.4 |
washing machines, dryers and dishwashers |
11.8 |
cookers, kettles and microwaves |
11.9 |
lights |
17.4 |
fridges and freezers |
17.5 |
Total |
73.0 |
Source: Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University.77
available for over twenty years, burn around a quarter of the energy of ordinary incandescent bulbs, yet so far we use them at an average rate of just 0.9 per household.78 It is still hard to find LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs, though these are even more efficient than compact fluorescents. A fridge or freezer which uses vacuum-insulated panels to stay cold burns about 12 per cent of the energy of the average model used today,79 but simply cannot be found for sale through the usual channels in the United Kingdom. Because electricity remains so cheap, and the incentives to conserve it are so slight, the great potential of new technology is mostly being squandered.
A rationing system would provide a permanent incentive to seek out better equipment, and the manufacturers, even if they were subject to no regulatory restraints, would try to supply it. But people can make sensible choices only if they know exactly what they are buying. While energy labelling in the European Union has improved, the manufacturing companies have done their best to make it as confusing as possible.
For example, companies selling fridges and freezers in the EU are obliged to give them labels showing how much electricity they consume. At first the sequence ran from A to G, with A being the most efficient, and the expectation was that the standard for every category would be steadily raised as time went by. But instead of doing this, the European Commission, under ‘political pressure by the manufacturers’80 simply added two new categories to the scheme: A+ and A++. So the appliances now sold as grade ‘A’ should in fact be grade ‘C’, and the true A (A++) is nowhere to be found. Energy-conscious people, most of whom remain ignorant of this duplicity, buy the fake ‘A’ equipment, believing it sits at the top of the range. There are no official energy labels at all for products like TVs and computers.
But even the weak guidelines we do possess could be at risk. In October 2005, a group of manufacturing countries, including the United States, China and South Korea, sought to persuade the World Trade Organisation that all energy labels are a ‘barrier to free trade’ and should be made illegal.81 The negotiations are continuing.
As well as labels, Europe does have some mandatory minimum standards, for goods such as fridges and freezers. Their utter feebleness is demonstrated by the fact that – despite the dire predictions of the manufacturers – the price of the regulated gadgets has continued to fall.82 In other words, the companies have been able to meet the new standards at very little cost, and the market could have borne a much tougher requirement.
In Japan and Australia by contrast, the government finds the most efficient model and insists that by a certain date all others must match it. The House of Lords alleges that because of the timidity of our rules, Europe is now becoming ‘a dumping-ground for less efficient goods’.83
It is also hard to understand why we cannot be allowed to see how much electricity our appliances are using. It would cost manufacturers next to nothing to install a panel on their gadgets – a bit like the digital thermometer in a fridge – showing how much electricity it is consuming. A study of households whose cookers were fitted with electricity meters found that they reduced the energy they used for cooking by an average of 15 per cent.84
Two studies show that a ‘smart meter’ measuring the electricity used by the whole house reduces consumption by around 12 per cent.85 A smart meter is a small panel put in a place where it can be easily seen – perhaps just inside the front door – with a clear digital display, preferably in a useful unit such as pence per hour. Some varieties can tell you how much electricity each appliance is using. At the moment, meters exist entirely for the benefit of the supplier. They are generally inaccessible and, when you have fought your way past the junk they are buried under, almost incomprehensible. One study shows that more than 50 per cent of adults do not know where their gas and electricity meters are, and 45 per cent can’t read them once they have found them.86
Just as shops would be able to make more money if they never put prices on their products, it is in the interests of the electricity suppliers that we should have no idea how much we are consuming. In Ontario, Canada, the government has ruled that smart meters will be installed in every home by the end of 2010.87 They will cost around 250 Canadian dollars – £100 – each. In the UK, by contrast, the government – perhaps as a result of lobbying by the electricity companies – obstructed an attempt by the European Union to start introducing them.88 The energy review it published in July 2006, however, suggests that this policy has changed.
A company called More Associates has taken the idea a step further. A meter just inside the front door not only displays the amount of electricity your house is using, but also contains an off switch: as you go out, you can turn off the entire house, except for the gadgets you have already selected to stay on permanently.89
And why should we not also be allowed to see how much carbon dioxide we have used? Food manufacturers now tell us how many calories their products contain. It would surely be no more difficult for the suppliers of gas and electricity to print our carbon dioxide consumption on the bills they send us.
So how far and how fast can we cut the carbon-based energy our houses use? The Environmental Change Institute set out to see whether the British government’s target of a 60 per cent reduction by 2050 could be met. It found that even with better heating and a slight growth in the number of gadgets, it could be – but only just.
In reality, these targets are approaching the extreme end of the policy envelope: it would be close to inconceivable to plan for tougher standards… on this timescale.90
And this was after the Institute had assumed that almost every house would have two ‘low or zero carbon technologies’ fitted to it, which means solar panels, solar hot water, heat pumps, wood burners, wind turbines or combined heat and power units.*
It seems to me that this might be slightly too gloomy. The report assumes, for example, that nothing can be done about the growth in the number of households. But as the climate-change campaigner George Marshall has pointed out, a programme that helped single elderly people to leave their big, draughty homes and move into smaller, warmer flats could both reduce the pressure for new building and cut the number of deaths in winter.91 Even so, the constraints the Institute identifies have to be taken seriously. There are physical limits to the degree to which the old housing stock can be improved. Thanks to yet another failure on the part of government – in this case to train skilled fitters92 – even when the right incentives exist, there aren’t enough people to do the work. However well the new means of saving energy are explained, some people just won’t follow them.
In other words, there are limits to energy efficiency, even within a cap and rationing system. The Environmental Change Institute’s figures suggest that the maximum reduction of energy use in housing by 2030 is likely to be a little over 30 per cent: around one third of my target.
What this means is that most of the cut will have to be made by changing the sources of the energy our buildings use: in other words by producing fuel and electricity whose carbon content is as low as possible. This task, which is much harder than many people – especially the advocates of renewable energy – have led us to believe, is the subject of the next three chapters.