System Innovation for Sustainability 4

Case Studies in Sustainable Consumption and Production ? Energy Use and the Built Environment

Saadi Lahlou

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781906093259
• eBook ISBN: 9781351279307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Buildings have a long lifetime, and so they are a major target for any structural changes in consumption patterns. Conversely, long lifetimes come with associated strong inertia. This book examines the opportunities to influence energy consumption in housing and buildings, and provides options for implementation at a macro, meso and micro level.

1
Introduction

Saadi Lahlou
EDF R&D, Clamart, France; London School of Economics and Political Science, London UK

Martin Charter and Tim Woolman
The Centre for Sustainable Design, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK

Arnold Tukker
TNO Built Environment and Geosciences, The Netherlands; Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of Product Design

This publication is a result of the European project SCORE! (Sustainable Consumption Research Exchange) and summarises the findings of the Working Group on Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) in the housing domain, focusing on energy use.

Housing is, with transport, a principal consumption domain for energy. According to the Environmental Impact of Products (EIPRO) report (Tukker et al. 2006), housing accounts for about a quarter of the environmental impact from the general consumption of products in the European Union, on a par with agriculture, food and mobility. These three consumption domains were selected in the SCORE! project as the areas to be tackled through case-study research and expert exchange to understand how a shift to more sustainable consumption and production can be organised and how implementation can be supported.

Energy consumption in housing and buildings is a key issue for sustainability, primarily because it contributes to the depletion of non-renewable fossil fuels and the production of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and other pollution. Trends in energy supply and demand can affect growth and indirectly affect many aspects of human activity. The opportunities to apply research to ‘windows of opportunity’ and to influence energy consumption in housing and buildings are therefore a major target for SCP policies, promoting implementation at the macro, meso and micro levels through a range of stakeholders. A growing body of evidence shows that cases demonstrating action towards SCP in energy use in housing can inspire innovation through a range of actors. Within the framework of the SCORE! project, our aim is to inform and accelerate steps towards sustainable, systemic change.

1.1 The SCORE! project

SCORE! is a network initiated with EU funding supporting the development of the UN 10 Year Framework of Programmes on Sustainable Consumption and Production. The mission of SCORE! has been to organise a leading science network that provides input to this framework. The EU funding for SCORE! ran between 2005 and 2008, engaging 28 institutions. By the organisation of major workshops and conferences the project engaged and structured a larger community of a few hundred professionals in the EU and beyond

The SCORE! philosophy assumes that SCP structures can be realised only if experts that understand business development, (sustainable) solution design, consumer behaviour and system innovation policy work together in shaping those structures. Furthermore, this should be linked with experiences of actors (industry, consumer groups, eco-labelling organisations) in real-life consumption areas: mobility, agro-food, and energy use in housing—together responsible for 70% of the life-cycle environmental impacts of Western societies (Hertwich 2005; Tukker et al. 2006). This led to the following approach to the project in two phases.

The first phase of the project, marked by a workshop organised with the support of the European Environment Agency (EEA) in Copenhagen in April 2006, aimed to arrange a positive confrontation of conceptual insights developed in the four aforementioned science communities (business development, sustainable solution design, consumer behaviour and system innovation) of how ‘radical’ change to SCP can be governed and realised. The results of this phase were published as the first book in the ‘System Innovation for Sustainability’ series (Tukker et al. 2008)

The second phase put the three consumption areas at centre stage. SCORE! Work package leaders inventoried cases that work with examples of successful switches to SCP in their field. In a series of conferences and workshops, these cases were analysed for ‘implementability’, adapted where needed, and policy suggestions were worked out that can support implementation. The results of this phase are published in this book and in two parallel books covering the areas of mobility, and agriculture and food (Geerken and Borup 2009; Tischner et al. 2010). The Paris SCORE! conference produced reviewed case studies (Lahlou and Emmert 2007), a selection of which are presented in this book.

As the SCORE! project will be followed up and as activities will be continued the organisers hope for further fruitful cooperation with the established group of experts as well as with new members. The reader is recommended to visit the SCORE! website for information on the continuation of activities contributing to SCP research in Europe and internationally.

1.2 Process, contributors and responsibilities for work on energy use in housing

1.2.1 Process

As the SCORE! project was a Coordinated Action within the EU 6th Framework research programme, the aim was to exchange and disseminate good practice and to promote and support the networking and coordination of research and innovation activities. Having built up a research community in the field of SCP, including experts in the different science fields and consumption domains, the two SCORE! project conferences and three interactive workshops enabled experts to focus on three consumption domains: energy use in housing (focusing on energy use), mobility and agriculture and food.

During the SCORE! conferences and workshops dedicated sessions on energy use in houses and buildings were held. Researchers sent in cases that showed either success or failure on the path to sustainable energy use in housing. During the conferences and workshops, cases that demonstrated learning from implementation were selected from a diverse inventory and the lessons learned were refined through discussion. This enabled conclusions and proposed steps for transition to more sustainable energy use in housing to be developed. Selected, edited cases presented in these sessions on energy use in housing have been included in the case study part of this book to provide more specific evidence. The proceedings of these sessions at the conferences are available on the SCORE! project website (www.score-network.org).

In the final workshop and conference, the team responsible for the area of energy use in housing presented thought-provoking statements and draft conclusions to stimulate debate on problems, trends, windows of opportunity and actions in a specific session that fed into the concluding chapter of this book.

1.2.2 Contributors and responsibilities

The SCORE! team members from Electricité de France (EDF) and The Centre for Sustainable Design (CfSD) were responsible for running the process within the area of energy use in housing. They organised the interaction during the workshops, performing desk-based research, writing an initial system analysis of the need area and providing conclusions across the cases presented.

The SCORE! network members participating in the project contributed by providing and presenting case studies and by active participation during workshop discussions. Also, other participants from the research community, policy circles, industry and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) provided and presented cases and actively participated. We want to thank them all for their input and intense collaboration, providing collective insights in this complex field within SCP.

1.3 Book outline

Chapter 2 provides a generic analysis of the housing and energy use domain, including sustainability challenges and a general analysis of potential opportunities for change. Examples of steps towards sustainable use of energy in houses and buildings, from ‘local experiments’, through ‘innovative communities’, to wider regime or non-local scale change, are provided through eight cases presented in the Chapters 3–10.

In Chapter 3 Brown and Vergragt illustrate the crucial importance of the quality of vision, project leaders and teams in the success of innovation at the first level of local experimentation towards SCP through the realisation of a design for a ‘zero-energy’ residential building in Boston.

In Chapter 4 Wimmer and Kang trace the history of a project creating a sustainable house made from straw bales; the S-House achieves a Factor 10 improvement in resource efficiency and provides an ongoing demonstration to disseminate the constituent technical innovations.

In Chapter 5 Wüstenhagen describes how a series of solar houses in Freiburg were built, examining the role of a ‘champion’, Rolf Disch, who became a social entrepreneur in creating social real estate funds to implement a new generation of houses that produce more energy than they consume.

In Chapter 6 Thorp describes how Woking Borough Council in the UK strives to reduce energy-related emissions from houses and buildings exceeding environmental policy targets. It has done this through holistic governance and technical and commercial innovation as well as by establishing an energy services company, enabling large novel fuel cell, combined heat and power (CHP) and photovoltaic (PV) installations and private-wire local distribution.

In Chapter 7 Kaltenegger and Tisch identified and analysed barriers linked to the implementation of product–service systems (PSS) in public procurement in Austria and strategies to deal with them in the context of energy-saving performance contracting for federally owned public buildings in Austria.

In Chapter 8 Loftness et al. address the renovation market issue through a tool developed at Carnegie Mellon University—BIDS™ (Building Investment Decision System)— addressing a block in the sustainable decision chain by feeding decision-makers with life-cycle performance and return on investment (ROI) of energy-saving architectural options based on actual cases.

In Chapter 9 Fischer reviews the influence of consumer feedback to stimulate electricity conservation through an analysis of 26 case studies, clearly showing that detailed metering and consumer feedback is a necessary step towards sustainability.

In Chapter 10 Reusswig, Lorek and Fuchs analyse the history of wind energy generation in Germany, showing how the influences of citizens, consumers and different regulation frameworks enable a gradual structuring of wind energy production and consumption into a set of interconnected politico-economic, social and lifestyle changes combined in a slow transitional process.

In Chapter 11 Lahlou et al. offer conclusions, reflecting on the findings and policy implications of the preceding chapters and suggesting how stakeholders can find a path to SCP in energy use in housing, notably through an appreciation of the three ‘layers’ influencing systemic change: physical affordances (from the building and from equipment), popular representations and practice and the institutional ‘rules of the game’.

References

Geerken, T., and M. Borup (eds.) (2009) System Innovation for Sustainability 2: Case Studies in Sustainable Consumption and Production — Mobility (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing; www.greenleaf-publishing.com/scp2).

Hertwich, E. (2005) ‘Life-cycle Approaches to Sustainable Consumption: A Critical Review’, Environmental Science and Technology 39.13: 4673.

Lahlou, S., and S. Emmert (eds.) (2007) ‘Sustainable Consumption and Production Cases in the Domain of Food, Mobility and Housing’, in Proceedings of the Workshop of the Sustainable Consumption Research Exchange (SCORE) Network, 4 and 5 June 2007, Paris, France; www.score-network. org/score/score_module/index.php?cat_name=cat_t_sco_milestonedoc&mst_id=23 (accessed October 2009).

Tischner, U., E. Stø, U. Kjærnes and A. Tukker (eds.) (2010) System Innovation for Sustainability 3: Case Studies in Sustainable Consumption and Production — Food and Agriculture (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing; www.greenleaf-publishing.com/scp3).

Tukker, A., M. Charter, C. Vezzoli, E. Stø and M. Munch Andersen (eds.) (2008) System Innovation for Sustainability 1: Perspectives on Radical Change to Sustainable Consumption and Production (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing; www.greenleaf-publishing.com/scp1).

—, G. Huppes, S. Suh, R. Heijungs, J. Guinee, A. de Koning, T. Geerken, B. Jansen, M. van Holderbeke and P. Nielsen (2006) Environmental Impacts of Products (Seville, Spain: European Science and Technology Observatory/Institute for Prospective Technological Studies [ESTO/IPTS]).

2
Energy use in houses and buildings and sustainable consumption

Saadi Lahlou
EDF R&D, France; London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

Martin Charter and Tim Woolman
The Centre for Sustainable Design, UK

Energy consumption is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Energy use in houses and buildings and sustainable consumption
• 3 An innovative approach to designing zero-energy residential buildings in Boston: enhancing and monitoring learning
• 4 S-House: sustainable building utilising renewable resources-Factor 10 building with innovative solutions
• 5 Rolf Disch's Solarsiedlung am Schlierberg: a solar housing estate in Freiburg; from architectural vision to entrepreneurial reality
• 6 Delivering affordable and sustainable energy: the results of innovative approaches by Woking Borough Council, UK
• 7 Energy-saving performance contracting for federally owned public buildings: success factors from the Austrian perspective
• 8 Building Investment Decision Support (BIDS™) for green building technologies
• 9 Consumer feedback: a helpful tool for stimulating electricity conservation? A review of experience
• 10 Lifestyle dynamics as a means toward the sustainability transition
• 11 Conclusions: steps towards more sustainable energy use in housing
• About the contributors
• Index