"Eco Bling"--UK Engineers Come Down on Unnecessary Home Solar and Wind Installations

No longer a moniker for enviro-friendly jewelry and accessories, Eco Bling has now been attached to the unnecessary domestic usage of home solar panels and wind turbines. At least by the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE).

In a recent report, authored by Doug King, the RAE suggests that the marketing-fueled scramble to install solar panels or wind turbines on home properties is not going to help the UK's zero-carbon new building goals by 2020.

"Eco-bling is a term I coined to describe unnecessary renewable energy visibly attached to the outside of poorly designed buildings," King told the Daily Mail ahead of the report's publication.

"It achieves little or nothing. If you build a building that is just as energy-hungry as every other building, and you put a few wind turbines and solar panels on the outside that addresses a few percent of that building's energy consumption, you have not achieved anything."

"Rather than spoiling the skyline with pointless roof-top windmills, people should spend the cash on basics - such as insulation, thermostats and sensibly designed offices," he said.

The report [pdf] introduces a new discipline; Building Engineering Physics, which supports the existing professions of architecture, structural engineering and building services engineering.

Building Engineering Physics investigates the areas of natural science that relate to the energy performance of buildings and their indoor and outdoor environments.

The understanding and application of Building Engineering Physics allows engineers to design and construct high performance buildings which are comfortable and functional, yet use natural resources efficiently and minimize the environmental impacts of their construction and operation.

In other words, attaching a solar panel to a home or installing a wind turbine on a property does not make a home energy efficient. In fact, its benefits are negligible if the building itself is inefficient.

So the real task is to treat the entire building and surrounding environment as an intricate whole and then look for solutions that can be implemented from the ground up. This means change by design.

The report suggests that government, which has set ambitious policy on climate change, can lead by example, ensuring that full commissioning and post-occupancy evaluations against design targets are undertaken on all new publicly funded projects.

Sources: RAE News Release, Mother Nature Network, Daily News