Why Build Better - Energy

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Energy is important for several reasons:

• It costs money and will, most likely, get considerably more expensive in the coming years
• Most of our current energy comes from fossil fuels, which are in increasingly short supply for increased global demand. This could lead to short and long term shortages and potentially to geo-political conflicts and instability
• Fossil fuels are the most important source of man made CO2 emissions, which are, in turn, the most significant cause of climate change

Building use accounts for about 50% of UK energy use and CO2 emissions. The construction of buildings accounts for another 5 to 10%.

At present energy use in buildings is increasing by between 1% and 2% per annum , and this in spite of regulatory measures to improve the energy efficiency of homes. Before we address why this might be however, we need to see where energy is used in buildings. The chart below is an approximate breakdown of energy use in current UK building stock.

From the above it is clear that by far the greatest use of energy in buildings is in space heating. For this reason much of our building regulations since the first oil crisis in 1974 have been to reduce energy use on heating by better insulation (and recently also by more efficient boilers). However, building energy use is increasing.

Why is this?