Fewer than 200 years ago, burning wood, which has a 50 percent carbon content, was the primary energy source for heating and cooking. The unearthing of buried fossil fuel, with its 75 percent carbon content, unleashed a new era of powerful and concentrated energy—enough to ignite and fuel a global industrial revolution. Horses were replaced by fossil-fueled cars and trains. Coal replaced wood for steam power, and oil and coal drove turbines to produce unlimited electricity and make boundless amounts of steel and concrete.
When carbon is burned, CO2 gas is released. This gas rises and coats the atmosphere like a thermal blanket. Solar radiation can get through the blanket, but some of it gets trapped down here, in the troposphere. The added heat is disrupting our normal weather patterns, leading to climate change.
We have a good fix-it plan: stop burning fossil fuels and use clean, non-polluting energy such as wind, solar or hydro (though dams are an environmental disaster). What is missing in this plan are both strategies to best use these energy sources and the importance of energy conservation. You might ask: Who cares how much energy we use, as long as it’s clean?
Our focus on buildings has long been about form: how buildings look, their curbside appeal and architectural details, their generous floor plans, number of bathrooms and cool materials. After the design is in place, we may or may not figure out how well they function. A glittering 30-story steel and concrete building with no insulation, surrounded by glass, is a prime example of form over function. We continue to build these structures.
California’s energy code building standards are a robust set of requirements—the best in the country. But these prescriptive measures do not require or test for actual performance. You can still build and buy a high-energy-consumption house that overheats in the summer and requires a lot of heat in the winter. The current trending thinking—or non-thinking—goes like this: “No problem, we will just add more solar panels, heat pumps and batteries to make up for the extra energy requirements.”
Yet we have the technology and know-how to build or convert a home that requires only a fraction of heating and cooling energy. Such home spaces also have unprecedented indoor thermal comfort that many of us have never experienced. To build in this way, we must employ science-based measures that target efficiency.
Many of us are used to paying more than $200 or $300 a month to heat our homes in winter. Imagine paying $30 a month, for both heating and cooling. That is not a pipe dream—it can, in fact, be done. And we only need eight solar panels on the roof, not 20, to zero out the cost.
Solar panels make energy. Heat pumps use less energy than their counterparts. Batteries store energy, but none of these contribute to needing less energy. The design and construction of beautiful houses and buildings is full of archaic traditions. Most homes are under-insulated or poorly insulated. Glass is often placed where it looks good, not necessarily where it works best or has the proper coatings per location. Air conditioning often augments a lack of planned shading. Shading is 80 percent more effective when it is placed on the outside of glass, yet 90 percent of our shading is placed on the inside—not only in houses, but also in cars. Why? Tradition, I guess.
I test houses for air leakage and find that all homes leak copious amounts of air. Typical houses built for the past 50 years can leak their entire volume of conditioned air through unseen holes five times in an hour, only to be replaced by whatever temperature or air quality is on the outside. California energy code building standards have no testing or requirements for air leakage in a house. Things like insulation and air sealing can make a house use less energy and be more thermally comfortable and resilient. A resilient home performs better when the grid or the battery is not working.
There is a school of building called “building science” that draws primarily on simple laws of physics to calculate or predict the performance of a building. To have a greater impact on mitigating climate change, we need to turn to the science of buildings first, and the tradition of buildings second. We must encourage our designers, builders and architects to learn and incorporate building science into their practices.
Terry Nordbye is a climate change building consultant who lives in Inverness.