In the book “Natural Capitalism” there’s a chapter which talks about ‘tunneling through the cost barrier’, which basically looks at all the things that can be improved by taking a systems approach and by doing things in the right order. One of the things they talk about in this respect is how to build structures better.
The prevailing wisdom of our urban landscape is build it fast, build it cheap, throw in lots of machines to make it habitable. They’re efficient in terms of man hours devoted to designing them and building them but after that they require lots of energy to keep them running. Over the lifespan of the building the cost of that energy will more than likely be a multiple of it’s building cost. This amounts to a small down payment to buy your ‘money pit’.
The prevailing wisdom is that if you try to reduce the energy requirements needed to keep the building habitable is that it will cost you big time. However there are some big assumptions at play here. The first is that in order to do this you have to add features to the money pit and this will cost money. They don’t assume taking anything out.
Ok, so let’s say you have a thermal mass that takes sunlight and radiates heat into the building. Let’s also say you have natural ventilation. Let’s also say you have a roof garden for insulation. It makes sense that working in harmony with sunshine and drafts, if properly harnessed by good design, will reduce or obviate completely the need for a furnace and an air conditioning system. A thermal mass is pretty much a concrete wall facing south so that the sun heats it. Putting glass in front of it can prevent it being aircooled. Depending on how you build it it can be used to heat the building, or heat air that draws cool air through the building in a gentle noise free breeze, or both.
So now let’s start taking things out of your building such as the big AC units, the heating equipment, the electrical systems to power both, the large back up generators. Now take that money and use it to purchase additional wall insulation, some solar panels to power it, a terrarium with rubber plants to clean and cool the air; lightshelves, skylights and light pipes to bring in natural sunlight, sensors controlling lights and water plus a roof garden to insulate the roof, protect the surface from UV light and moderate water run off from your building. Chances are it won’t cost much more to build than the first building but running costs will be a fraction of the first. Additionally, there are probably some government grants in there as well, and don’t forget if you have a network of such buildings you can sell your carbon credits on the rapidly expanding global market.
Take things a few steps further and your building could in theory produce more energy than it needs selling the rest or pumping it into your electric vehicles (people are already converting the Prius to fully electric) . You could sell any excess heat into supplying nearby buildings (in Tokyo where buildings almost merge anyway there’s a lot of scope for this) . This is really expanding into the field of industrial ecology though.
We already have the technology to ensure that our homes make money for us and are not just a continual drain on our resources. What would I do with the extra money? Well I’d probably invest in other ways to make my home or business premises pay for themselves and more. Then I’d start thinking about helping others do the same.
