I have avoided using or engaging with the term “exergy” mainly because I’ve never quite understood it. Until now. I came across this post by John Michael Greer and it has helped me make connections between a few key ideas I have been thinking about recently.

Many discussions about renewable energy sources seek to demonstrate they are capable of replacing existing fossil fuel energy sources because they yield the same amount of energy over similar periods of time. In the extreme case it is argued that the amount of solar energy falling on the earth is numerically much greater than we currently need. This may well be so, but the crucial point is not the quantity of energy but the availability of that energy to “do work.” It is this variability in the quality of energy sources that undermines what is sometimes referred to as “the swap” in which current energy sources are simply replaced by renewables to support “business as usual.”

In the context of heated buildings, the ability of a source of energy to “do work” can be interpreted as delivering warmth to occupants. But as the post on exergy suggests, the concentration of heat is important and concentrated sources of warmth indoors are only available from fossil fuels. The erroneous assumption often made about warmth is that it doesn’t matter how it is delivered as long as it is capable of creating a comfortable environment. However, we know thermal comfort depends on the recent experience. If I return home on a cold day, what I want is not a uniform level of heating, which is increasingly the norm in new, highly insulated dwellings with small heating systems, but a high temperature heat source that will help me recover from the outside conditions quickly. There is an aesthetic pleasure to this which should not be underestimated.

My hunch is that if we examine thermally related behaviour in buildings we will find much of it is driven by the pursuit of thermal experience that often lies outside the conventional understanding of thermal comfort. It is important to take this on board when we consider the delivery of heat and warmth in dwellings because if we don’t, it is highly likely that the occupants will take steps to restore enjoyable thermal experience, regardless of the consequences for energy consumption or carbon dioxide emissions.

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So maybe there should have been tape on this door as in this previous post.

This is what happens when (bad) affordances are not obvious.

Spotted on boingboing

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The Centre is currently engaged in a European funded research project (acronym: SUSREF) looking at how to improve the energy and environmental performance of existing external walls, mainly on older properties. For the past two days I have been visiting houses in North Wales with solid stone external walls to assess their suitability for monitoring and eventual upgrading.

Each house poses unique technical problems that remind me why I enjoy doing research rooted in real problems. But even more than that I love meeting the people who live in these houses and hearing about how they operate them. Their attitudes and activities are far removed from the hypothetical, rationalised opinions of the engineers and building scientists I talk to most days. It’s refreshing. It’s also scary, because it highlights the huge task ahead of us in trying to reduce CO2 emissions.

In the living room of one home, with uninsulated external walls, there was a storage heater, a portable convector and a three-bar, electric, radiant heater. All of these had been used simultaneously during the recent cold spell. In another house, the occupants admitted they kept the coal fire lit all year round and also left an electric heater running continuously in the upstairs bedroom. In both houses the occupants had good reasons for adopting energy-intensive practices: the rooms would be unbearably cold without them.

It would be easy to rationalise the problem and simply say these people (never us) need to undergo “behaviour change,” as the current fashion would suggest, but that is to miss the point. Smokers need some “behaviour change” too, say many non-smokers. If we want to change energy-consuming habits (including ours) then we need to understand why we engage in current practices before developing attractive, alternative experiences that will encourage new habits. Complaining that others refuse to follow our plans is not good enough and unlikely to succeed.

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This must be every architect’s nightmare. The dark, shiny, and slippery-when-wet marble floor is an accident waiting to happen, or more likely has already happened, in this hotel foyer in Bilbao.

The solution: cover everything that represents a potential trip or slip hazard with hideous yellow and black warning tape. One redeeming aspect is that the original design was nothing special in the first place, so it is no great loss. Still, it is a lesson for designers to think about how their designs might actually be used.

Footnote: Gibson’s notion of affordance embraced what the environment offers for “good or ill.”

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I’ve written here before about the need to understand how people interact with low energy buildings, and not just the heating system controls. Some of my current thinking is documented in this short paper I wrote for the in-house journal, MADE, published by the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University.

Click here to access the PDF.

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Having missed a train-to-plane connection in Charles De Gaulle airport a couple of weeks ago I found myself with a few hours to spend near Paris. Rather than trudge around the city centre with my baggage I decided to visit Parc La Villette, which is closer to the airport and is a relaxing place to spend a sunny afternoon.

I couldn’t resist trying out the Vélib cycle hire system. The bikes are very different to the Ridgeback Element I normally use for my daily commute and my treasured Brompton I use when I want to go multimodal on the train or plane; so different that I managed to bash my shin on the locking mechanism. It took me awhile to get used to the heaviness and lack of maneuverability, made worse by putting my heavy hand baggage in the bike’s front basket.

Initially I struggled with the registration and credit card procedures, but eventually got the hang of it. I returned the bike to the same stand I hired it from, but I can see the advantage in being able to pick up and drop off at different locations across Paris.

The scheme is experiencing some problems with theft and vandalism, as noted here, but the municipality is taking steps to address these by developing a new version of the bike and is demonstrating its commitment by proposing to extend the scheme further into the suburbs, as described here.

Radical initiatives and projects to improve sustainability are certain to meet varying degrees of resistance from some (or all) sections of society. The hard part in promoting these changes is in deciding early on whether they are worth persevering with or should be abandoned. One of the best guides to making tough decisions is Seth Godin’s The Dip which advocates quitting fast and often as a strategy to avoid dead-ends.

Although The Dip is a lighthearted look at how to get through (or avoid) the hard part in bringing projects to fruition, there are lessons that can be applied to more serious types of project, such as those that will be needed to realise sustainable cities. The Vélib cycle scheme is one that requires pushing through its current dip. In sustainable development we will need lots of innovative projects, many of which will never get past the dip, but that’s okay. It’s alright to be wrong.

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The students will be presenting their final work on this British Council funded project tonight, from 6.30 pm in the old NatWest Bank on Bute Street in Cardiff. From what I’ve seen of the activities, it should be an interesting evening.

I took part in the debate organised by the British Council as part of the project on Monday night in the same venue. It was a good discussion about future scenarios for cities in general and Cardiff in particular. Unfortunately, it did descend into a bit of a slanging match between architects and planners towards the end.

Before that, however, one contributor, a young female student from India who had never been outside her own country before, made us acutely aware of two differences in cultural practices that exist between India and the UK: first, she questioned why we use toilet paper instead of washing; and second, she couldn’t understand why water in plastic bottles isn’t banned. We didn’t probe the first point too deeply in the relative amounts of water used, but there was a loud cheer from the audience to accompany the second.

The overwhelming message from the audience seemed to be that we need to reuse and adapt as many existing buildings as we can rather than tear them down and build afresh. The venue itself offered a good example of a building that could serve multiple new purposes, if only someone would invest some time and care in it.

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In an earlier post, I argued that the scope of ’sustainability’ extends beyond the dominant concerns of low carbon design and energy conservation and how we need to continuously commit to the core principles of sustainable development rather than allow a shallow linguistic fatigue persuade us to abandon the term, simply because we are tired of it.

This is underlined in the Top 10 Myths about Sustainability published recently in Scientific American, which also dispels the idea that sustainability means lowering our standard of living (Myth 6) and that new technology is always the answer (Myth 8).

These are all interesting correctives, though I would have preferred to see even greater emphasis on social sustainability and the importance of it to achieving widespread human happiness.

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Mel Starrs has provided an excellent post on the way in which LEED and BREEAM treat biodiversity. Apparently, there is no common approach to dealing with this aspect of the environment among current assessment tools. The post highlights the main differences between two of the most frequently used methods.

Though the post draws heavily on the recently published UKGBC report, it offers some useful advice on making sure anything other than the smallest projects employs a professional ecologist.

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Mark Brinkley has published a useful graph on his blog summarising the output from different types of lighting compared to the power consumption. The graph clearly shows the advances that have been made in developing more efficient forms of lighting than the incandescent bulb. What’s missing of course is any indication of the quality of the light.

One of the main criticisms levelled at compact fluorescents, for example, is that people don’t like the light they produce—the long time taken to reach full brightness is often mentioned. Similarly, the colour rendering properties of LEDs are often criticised because they are so different to incandescent light sources.

Postscript: I was in Cardiff market one day buying a starter for a fluorescent tube fitting when the man in front of me asked the stall holder for one of those “energy bulbs.”

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