Speaking at the Builtech Asia conference in Hong Kong in January 2008, a panel of professionals and academics grappled with the thorny concepts and definitions surrounding the resurgent topic of green buildings. The discussion, chaired by Professor John Gilleard, Principal, Sloane Partnership, former Head of Buildings Services Engineering at HK PolyU, now consultant for Sloan Associates, and regular RFP contributor, underlined the diverse variety of approaches and opinions on a topic that is on everybody’s lips.
Beyond green buildings
Before identifying if technology can enable green buildings, it is first necessary to agree on a definition of what makes a facility ‘green’. K S Wong, Associate Director, Ronald Lu & Partners and Vice-chairman, Professional Green Building Council of Hon Kong, says that, put simply, ‘A green building should be comfortable and healthy while minimising the loading, the impact on the environment.’ Wong points to the HK-BEAM and LEED ratings as tools to establish the design criteria necessary to achieve this goal.
Erk Schaffarcyzk, Sustainability Consultant, Robarts Interiors points out that, with construction accounting for huge quantities of raw materials, ‘we need to think about the design, and try to incorporate the many things that are existing on the earth for free.’ It is already possible to create zero-energy buildings on a small or medium scale. The end goal, Schaffarcyzk believes, must be, ‘To take something from the earth and give something back.’
| Technology already exists that can do good for the environment, but it is hard to find this sustainable technology in use |
While design criteria may be the most common way of defining a green building, the operational aspect should not be overlooked. In fact, in these operational terms says Robert Allender, Founder, Energy Resources Management, ‘There are currently very few, if any, green buildings on the planet. The best thing we as an industry can do is to find some other way of describing buildings that are good, bad or indifferent in terms of their impact on the environment.’
Enviro-savvy
Whether technology can be the cure-all for our underperforming buildings sector in the fight against climate change is a hotly debated topic. ‘I am a firm believer that technology can be used in the right way to make buildings greener,’ says H.N. Lam, Associate Professor, University of Hong Kong. As the demand for systems that improve energy efficiency increases, manufacturers can reach economies of scale and reduce the cost to end-users. This results in the more widespread use of technologies such as occupancy sensors and efficient HVAC items.
By questioning the true value of high-tech solutions, Schaffarcyzk takes a pragmatic position. ‘With high tech we are trying to adapt the conditions of one product to fit a global range of conditions. This is the wrong approach,’ he says. Photo-Voltaic (PV) cells are a pertinent example. While extremely useful for locales where mainstream energy supply is not available, they are not intrinsically the environmentally friendly product they may seem to be. ‘Besides the raw materials,’ he explains, ‘to produce a PV cell requires maybe four to five times more energy than it will produce in its lifetime.’
High-tech gadgets, gizmos and systems also complicate the situation, making choices more difficult to specify and often shift attention from the real environmental performance. ‘Technology already exists that can do good for the environment, but it is hard to find this sustainable technology in use, even though some of these products have existed for ten or twenty years,’ Schaffarcyzk laments. Much of what goes into our buildings is technology that was developed decades ago. While we do not question this, we should ask ourselves if would be willing to drive a car built with an engine and breaking system built in the 1970s.
Intentionality
At the end of the day, says Allender, ‘The technology isn’t the question, it is not what’s missing.’ Most of the green products that are touted as the next big thing have already been seen in some form or another in the past and some have even been available for ten or fifteen years. As Allender points out, ‘Perhaps what we really need to do is find out why the technology is not being used rather than concentrating on which technology needs to be used.’
It is this question of intentionality which invariably decides the performance of our buildings. Rather than just asking what new technology is just around the corner or when some manufacturer will release a newly tweaked version of an existing solution, the decision to use technology to achieve low climate-impact buildings has to made, right from the outset. ‘You can see that there is serious lagging behind in the adoption of new technologies for buildings,’ says Professor Lam. He strongly believes that building engineers and designers need to improve communication and work together, and that the former need to learn from the latter especially in terms of willingness to adopt new ideas.
Carrot and stick
The vicious circle of eco-friendly building, whereby the onus for environmental improvement is shifted between developers, investors, designers and tenants, is also at the heart of the role of technology. ‘The client, the developers and the investors are always looking at the return on investment and not at whether the technology is good,’ says Schaffarcyzk. The answer, perhaps, lies with the authorities. Good legislation can be a significant driver for change.
‘If we are going to deal with climate change and global warming,’ Allender believes, ‘we really need to do things in the short-term, and based on Hong Kong and indeed mankind’s past history, legislation is going to be required.’ The SAR government are in the midst of a public consultation on making optional building energy codes mandatory, however, much as there is good and bad green technology it also seems that there is good and bad green legislation.
An inconvenient choice
‘I don’t believe that the current plan of having a proscribed design criteria is going to drive real results.’ says Allender. ‘What we need is a common understanding of how efficient a building is, to have metrics and numbers.’ Again referencing the automobile metaphor, any car owner should be able to tell you how many miles per gallon they can achieve, but ask a landlord how efficient their building is and it is doubtful they would know the kilowatt hour (KWH) usage per sqm, or even have a rough idea of what an optimum figure would be.
The answer, he continues, is not to proscribe a particular type of technology or design. Instead, giving people free rein to see how they can achieve results, and the metrics they need to measure there performance, has a much greater chance of encouraging excellence. Schaffarcyzk agrees with this concept, but adds a note of caution ‘If there is law that a new building can only use 50KWH per sqm per year, it would be very easy to choose materials and a design to manipulate a final figure to look good, but maybe the best environmental choices have not been made. It’s even more important that people are willing to invest time and money in understanding and improving environmental aspects.’
This understanding, it would seem, is at the heart of the conundrum of applying technological solutions to meet the challenge of environmental performance and climate change. ‘Whether some technology can be considered as green technology and other can not be is difficult,’ says Professor Lam. In years past, conventional energy efficient air-conditioning systems were achievable at low costs. However, the chemical refrigerants that drove these systems were found to damage the ozone layer, and a ‘good’ technology was revealed as harmful. As the branding of green friendly or unfriendly technology depends on the limits of our scientific knowledge, perhaps the best we can do is pay extra care to understand the basis of these technologies and apply them properly. As Professor Lam concluded, ‘The proper use of technology is more important than whether the technology is green or not in itself.”
