Johannes Weninger My Energy Bill Is Zero Contents
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a term paper for the course urban ecology, institute for urban design, university of innsbruck thoughts about the urgent challenge of energy efficiency in an urban context and proposals for a future direction Johannes Weninger my energy bill is zero Contents The Challenge 3 The BIG project 4 The urgent challenge of energy efficiency 7 Sustainability 9 Energy use in buildings 10 Summary 12 The Tactics 13 Handling the challenge 14 The holistic approach 15 Financial mechanisms 15 Changing behavior 16 The BIG approach 18 Summary 20 Conclusion 21 Laws and regulations 22 Architects in meantime 23 Chapter 1 THE CHALLENGE “A building has a long life cycle, so its effect on the environment is a long and continuing issue to consider.” - NGO, China from the EEB project perception research The BIG project When the Bjarke Ingels Group, an architectural office from Denmark (in the following named BIG), got faced with a project they would call afterwards Little Denmark, they did not knew where their work would take them to. But they had a definite position: creating a long needed new manifesto for hedonistic sustainability. The first thing they did, was to check the “10 commandments of good consumption” and to reformulate them in a way they would fit into BIGs direction of thinking. You can see this in Figure 1-1. THE CHALLENGE At the same time there was a heated debate triggered by “Copenhagen Consensus” - Bjorn Lom- borg’s initiative to put a price tag and a priority on earth’s greatest social and environmental chal- lenges - which uncovered a fundamental misunderstanding that pits ecology against economy as good vs. evil. But in fact, they are not diametric opposites, but rather two sides of the same story. Ecological initiatives will only prosper in the real world if they work as viable economic models. And business models based on wearing down our natural resources are not viable models for long term growth. Figure 1-1: 10 commandments of good consumption © by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), Denmark BIG must have thought the same way when they formulated the sentence “Economy and ecology need to merge into ecolomy” and so they started - with their changed commandments as back- ground - to think about a system, a designed society like a perpetual motion engine, with the goal to reduce Denmarks energy bill to zero. Even when this sounds not very reliable at the first glance, their final research result and proposal proves that the idea is not that bad at all. But we’ll come back to this a little bit later. 4 | THE CHALLENGE For now we should have a closer look at Denmark to understand the meaning of reducing an whole countries energy bill to zero. THE CHALLENGE Denmark is at its core (without Greenland and Färöer) about 47.000 km2 large and has about 129 inhabitants per km2. Regarding to the overall oil consumption of the country each inhabitant uses 3643 kilogramms of oil per year. That is more than twice as much than the worlds average. But Den- marks trend in this sector inclines to a drastically reduction. While the worlds oil consumtion raised about 4,4 percent within the last 20 years, Denmarks spent about 5,7 percent less. But even when Denmark is on his way to an energy equilibrium their energy bill is with about 175.000.000 mWh1 per year still enormous. Just to get a rough image about the values: With the fuel they burn for their daily lives we would be able to send a rocket to Mars and back again 50 times per year! So now we have got some basic data and we’ve already got into contact with the main actor in BIGs Little Denmark. But what would it take to supply all of Denmark with sustainable energy? BIG did a research on that and checked three different types of sustainable energy sources: 1 The Sun 2 Biogas 3 The Wind If we would rely on the sun, the best region to place our solar panels would be definitely the Stor- strom County in the south-east of Denmark. The Storstrom County is a conglomerate of a few small islands and nowadays, because of its geographical location, well-known for its products from the sea, and its harbors which makes access from the Baltic Sea more convenient. Aside from that, Danish historical records often make mention of castles and churches built in this region by the members of the Danish royal family themselves. Many sites in Storstrom County have been witness to many historic battles of Denmark, such as with the Germans, Swedish, and Austrians over the centuries. The battle for Denmarks lower energy bill would be the last one for the Storstrom County be- cause it would take almost the whole region to place our 1.747 m2 of solar panels, as shown in Figure 1-2. But there would be not just a huge loss of land, also the cost would be with about 1.000.000.000.000 € enormous. So Option A sounds not good at all. Let’s move on and check the biogas solution. Biogas, as a renewable energy source, is basically biological material from living, or recently living organisms. As an energy source, biomass can either be used directly, or converted into other en- ergy products such as biofuel. But independent of the way you want to use it - to produce it, you need to feed something or you need to grow something. Depending on the raw materials different biogas yields are reached and depending upon its com- position a gas with variable methane content is produced. Plants as a raw material will result in a higher yield (m3 per ton) while using manure will produce gases with a higher methane percent- age. Well, Denmarks currently most common raw material in biogas production is pig manure. Therefore it seems natural to use it for our small experiment. But let’s make it quick: If we rely on biogas we would need the manure from a pig farm the size of the greater metropolitan area of copenhagen. And thats about 2.000 km2. But theres one more option left. Not just pigs are producing manure, also humans do. An average 1 Yes is more. An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution, © 2009 BIG A/S, ISBN 978-3-8365-2010-2 THE CHALLENGE | 5 THE CHALLENGE Figure 1-2: The area in Storstrom County covered with solar panels © by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), Denmark danish inhabitant produced 0,5 tons of manure and 2,5 tons of waste per year. And according to BIGs research Danish waste is as combustible per kilo as wood. The combusted waste fuel plus the biogas from the average dane is sufficient to cover one’s share in the Danish energy bill. In fact, the Danish population could become their own energy source. So Option B sounds almost better than Option A. Let’s have a look at Option C - the wind power. Basically the total amount of economically extractable power available from the wind is consider- ably more than present human power use from all sources. And wind is for free, even when the wind farms aren’t, and an inexhaustible source. In addition offshore wind power can harness the better wind speeds that are available offshore compared to on land, so offshore wind power’s con- tribution in terms of electricity supplied is higher. Compared to the environmental impact of traditional energy sources, the environmental impact of wind power is relatively minor. Wind power consumes no fuel, and emits no air pollution, un- like fossil fuel power sources. The energy consumed to manufacture and transport the materials used to build a wind power plant is equal to the new energy produced by the plant within a few months.2 So wind power seems like a wise choice to bet on. And Denmark with its flat landscape and direct access to the sea seems like the perfect surrounding. But even with the technology developed furthest we would still need a windfarm of 75 x 75 km of windmills to keep Denmark covered. And then the country would heavily rely on one massive centralised enterprise. 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power 6 | THE CHALLENGE So what we can see is that even with this fast research of BIG Denmarks energy bill could easily be covered, but betting all on one energy source does not seem like a wise choice. THE CHALLENGE BIG also thought like that when they had a look at their research results. And so they came up with a new idea that will be shown a little bit later in Chapter 2. In the meantime there are a few ques- tions left. What causes architects to step out of their domain planning buildings and to come up with new ideas about energy reduction? Do they just care about the future more than others? Or is architecture linked stronger to energy demand than other disciplines? And of course: What exactly is The urgent challenge of energy efficiency The WBCSD, a CEO-led, global association of some 200 international companies dealing exclusively with business and sustainable development3, identified buildings as one of the five main users of energy where “megatrends” are needed to transform energy efficiency. According to their statistics buildings account for 40% of primary energy in most countries, and the trend in consumption is rising. The International Energy Agency (IEA), a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organization which acts as a policy adviser to its member states and has a broad role in promoting alternate energy sources (including renewable energy), rational energy policies, and multinational energy technology co-operation4, estimates that current trends in energy de- mand for buildings will stimulate about half of energy supply investments to 2030.5 And that’s just the current trend.