Building emissions

A horrible news report appeared earlier today in the Financial Times. The outlet formerly known as a reputable source of relatively unbiased information cited a warning from the UK’s public spending regulator that people were not buying heat pumps and this was a very bad thing.

The reason people were not buying heat pumps, the National Audit Office concluded, was that their prices were not falling quickly and substantially enough. Apparently, the UK government had made some quite unrealistic predictions about price declines in the heat pump space and now they were coming back to haunt it.

Heat pumps cost about four times as much as gas boilers, the report informs us. This is quite an investment to make for most households, not only in the UK. But it’s not the only significant investment households in the UK and Europe are about to be forced to make as greenulators try to tackle emissions from buildings.

The European Parliament earlier this month voted on what Euractiv called a controversial law obliging member states to implement substantial reductions in emissions from buildings. By 2030, per that law, called the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, all newbuilds must be emission-free, with government buildings supposed to go emission-free two years earlier.

The most charming part of the directive? “When calculating the emissions, member states will take into account the life-cycle global warming potential of a building, including the production and disposal of the construction products used to build it.”

The obvious inference from the above would be that energy consumption in these buildings must be efficient on an otherworldly scale — or, you know, pretty low — to offset all the emissions that went into the production, transportation, and use of all the materials that went into making it.

Indeed, there is a stipulation in the EPBD that says energy consumption from residential buildings must be cut by between 20% and 22% by 2035. Insulation mandates won’t be enough.

If there is one thing the European bureaucracy truly excels at it is making simple things as complicated as possible, including for itself. The buildings directive is no exception but a great example of this.

Not only is it going to force property owners into spending tens of thousands on insulation, rooftop solar (and no doubt heat pumps) but it’s also going to create mountains of paperwork for calculating “life-cycle global warming potential”.

Ironically, it could have been a lot worse. The final version of the directive has given member states the freedom to choose how to go about hitting their building emission reduction targets, which is not how central planners like their laws but it seems they were forced to make concessions to get the law passed. Now it’s going to get interesting.