In Victoria (and I presume other Australian states have passed similar rules) new homes now need to meet “five-star” energy efficiency standards, implying things like roof insulation, double-glazed windows, solar heating systems and rainwater tanks, which were supposed to cut the energy requirements by up to 50% compared to existing building stock.
Unfortunately, according to a leaked report to the state government, it’s not working. New Victorian houses are using 6% more energy than the state average, not less. Why? Several reasons. New houses are much bigger than the state average, meaning that the efficiency gains in heating are chewed up by the sheer volume that needs to be heated. And lit - often with halogen downlights lighting the place up like a movie set. And, of course, the ubiquitous plasma TV. Particularly in response to the expanded house sizes, this seems like a textbook case of Jevons paradox in action.
In response, the leaked report apparently recommends placing “some restraint” on house size, as well as including more aspects of the house (such as lighting) under the energy efficiency rules.
Rather than further micromanagement, I suggest Andrew Leigh’s approach to the great milk shortage.
Huh? A market-based solution? Is this Catallaxy or LP?
I’ve been consistently arguing in favour, generally, of market-based solutions on climate change and water ever since I’ve been posting on LP.
As others have pointed out, it’s not an either-or situation; there are situations where the market doesn’t work particularly well (for instance, energy efficiency for rented properties). But I am persuaded that the micromanagement approach to dictating exactly how householders will conserve water and energy has achieved far less, at a far greater cost, than alternatives.
Where I would strongly disagree with the Catallaxians is that if such approaches are disproportionately hurting the less well-off, something should be done to guard against this. However, I would argue that the best approach is to give the less well-off more money, rather than selectively subsidising some purchases but not others.
Damien at that ‘other site’ has hit the nail on the head:
“You left out the bit where, despite the scarcity of milk, the country had yoghurt and butter industries which used enourmous quantities of milk.”
And the butter makers got their milk for free!
Never forget who uses most water in this country.
It is not the city dwellers.
Why don’t we mandate that every McMansion accommodate at least one refugee family in addition to the other occupants? Many birds… not too many stones.
More here - http://urbancreature.id.au/blog/?p=594
George Monbiot reckons that if you want to regulate to solve the problem you’d need half the population to police the other half. OK he didn’t quite say that, but he accepts the impossibility of using regulation as the whole solution and looks to the market-based solutions also.
Sumptuary laws required.
Aaron, within a week Delfin, Stockland, and their ilk would have modified their designs slightly such that they’d be claiming in their planning applications that the second bathroom was in fact a “bathroom-themed fetish room”. Thus the new owners would not be required to host a refugee family… :/
We don’t have such a scheme in W.A. (the building industry doesn’t want it) - but couldn’t the regulations be tied to how many square metres the house is: more square metres = bigger rain water tank or solar panels feeding x amount of electricity back into the grid ?
Robert Merkel wants the impossible and everybody who is reading this knows it.
He wants to cut fossil fuel energy use and he wants to do it by increasing the price of petrol, electricity, water and food through a carbon tax of one sort or another. (He says he only wants to make renewable energy sources competitive with cheap coal - actually he wants to cut our wasteful western living standards. However, if the cut affects poor people he wants to compensate us to that extent.
Poor people, means billions of us around the globe with poor actually being a relative concept that to Robert’s great dismay will move higher next year. The compensation therefore has to be so much that we will continue to use exactly the same rate of INCREASE in use that we do now! That makes a nonsense of his goal and he knows it.
Yet there is no static standard that Robert and the rest of the greens would admit to tying us too. So they fudge it and try to ignore the cost impact. They know it’s electoral poison. But in this post he is perfectly clear. Up the price of carbon!
100 years ago working people used far less energy, took far fewer trips, used far fewer foods from afar etc than they do now (how about air fares as the best example). Every year of subsequent industrialization has ensured that we have a higher standard of living and it is accelerating (not fast enough of course) but so fast as to terrify Robert and the rest of the global warming hysterical right wingers that still think of themselves as somehow left wing.
Naturally he wishes the cost impact on the poor were otherwise but the planet is at stake no less, so the short term solution is to push up the price of everything and then compensate everybody affected later! Wait till the battlers hear about what you want to do to them - for their own good no less.
I wonder when the voters in the marginal seats will start to notice that the Greens are the most right-wing followed by the ALP and the Howard Tweedle’s are now to the left of them?
I doubt that genuine left-wingers will be able to convince them that voting informal is the best option when Howard is clearly the best bet to protect their standard of living.
When Flannery screams we have ten years to act then that’s got to be worth a three year bet.
Let’s do nothing and see what Flannery and Garrett have to say in three years time (when we are three years richer with 3% growth). After all Howard has done the job on work choices, and David Hicks and Howard is a better war time leader than Rudd with the let’s leave the troops in Afghanistan nonsense.
All the rest is me to ism anyway or have I missed something ever so important like saving the unions from continuing on their way to extinction?
Robert - in that case, they should be forced to share the one bathroom until such time as the “bathroom-themed fetish room” has been modified accordingly.
Nothing like one bathroom between 10 to bring people closer together!
Speaking of Renovations, it seems the Rodent’s Dining Room makeover has been boned
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,21768385-5005361,00.html
Hysterical, Patrickm, in both senses of the word.
Did you know wholesale electricity prices in Victoria are 50% higher this year than they were last year?
The price of oil’s gone up threefold in the past few years.
And yet much more modest and gradual rises due to carbon charging are supposed to cause economic doom.
Robert,
I read Andrew’s milk parable, and was suitably amused. However I’m not sure how it is applicable to energy efficiency regulations in new home construction. All new homes have to be designed to comply with regulations. All we’re talking about are some changes to these existing regulations.
The five-star system has always been flawed. We purchased a 25 year old piece of crap Jennings project home about 6 years ago here in Canberra. The major reason for deciding to buy it was that it was appropriately solar oriented (long axis of the house runs east-west — the bedrooms are on the northern side, but this was the best we could find after looking for a number of months).
When we got the energy efficiency report we discovered we were marked down because we had north facing windows without exterior blinds! Sweet Jesus! There are entirely appropriate eaves so blinds are unnecessary. We live in Canberra so solar passive heating is an absolute boon.
We also spent some time cruising around those show-home developments they do in new suburbs to look for design ideas for our in-laws. We were gob-smacked that some of these monstrous homes with floor to ceiling glass on their western wall and no visible method for “zoning” their heating requirements could get a five-star rating. Madness. Who made up these bizarre regs? Any improvement has to be a good thing.
In our house we retro-fitted cavity wall insulation, have conducted a jihad on drafts and have added insulation in the roof where it was inadequate. Yesterday the minimum temperature was 6 and the max 16. Our little box dropped down to 14 (so the gas central heating came on for about half an hour) and then during the day was 16 (no one was home so we didn’t have the heating on). The aforementioned in-laws eventually built a solar-passive home (near Canberra). At their place the lowest it got was 18, and it was 23 in the middle of the day.
They used no additional heating whatsoever.
It ain’t rocket science.
The point is that whatever the regulations, it seems that developers will just game them if it’s a cost to the developer and purchaser, rather than a selling point.
If the cost of energy were increased, however the buyers of houses will start to care about their energy bills and choose houses with lower ones, or take action to make their existing house more energy-efficient.
It would be a bit absurd (OK a lot absurd) for the Victorian Government to start regulating the size of houses. Since they’ve already instituted the main household energy efficiency measure, there’s only one obvious solution - tax em until it hurts.
Fully offset the taxes with subsidies for energy efficiency and some social equity measures and the job is as good as done.
Everyone:
Thought-provoking posts. Thanks.
wilful says
I don’t think the ALP will go into the election sprouting that yet that is what many in the party or sympathetic to it seem to want.
I think this thread (attacking big homes that use a lot of cheap coal powered energy) reveals the big threat to the ALP / Greens from an obvious backlash from battlers.
Taxing them till it hurts hurts! Kissing it better later is no answer.
5 stars is only 5 out of 10. Only rating the building envelope is a bit moronic. You get 5 stars for good insulation, but you are allowed to have:
* electric bar radiators throughout the house
* an evaporative air cooler on the roof
* whole of house central air conditioning
* bricks on the outside, where you DON’T want the thermal mass.
* no solar array
* no passive solar design - inappropriate window sizes and placement
* no eaves (saves on roof tiles) to allow your house to really heat up
* energy guzzling fridges (2 or 3) and other appliances
* spotlights outside that shine all night
* subdivisions with blocks oriented so that solar gain is minimal
* etc.
And all the energy minister Peter Batchelor can do is whine about “people using air conditioners and driving up peak load“.
The strategies for reducing energy consumption are not rocket science, and many are not expensive, some even save money?
What are they doing in Spring Street? Sitting back in their chairs too much I think, and oblivious to what is happening in the real world.
We need some real leadership, not all this reactive nonsense.
Peterc
as much energy as you are prepared to pay for.
So what is it from your predictable long list do you want to ban?
Currently nobody is stopping you from living as you choose, what do you want to impose on the rest of us?
Banning things (like Turnbull’s recently announced ban on incandescent light globes) is only a tactical measure, and the list would keep growing.
It is better to ensure that pricing signals are adjusted in favour of low carbon emissions.
A reasonable carbon tax ($50/tonne) would be go a long way to addressing the current very high usage of electricity generated by burning coal. It is fair that those who chose to use dirty energy pay the price for doing so.
You only need to look at petrol prices going up to $1.30 per litre resulting in a 30% increase in the use of public transport.
In Germany, the feed in tariff rewards zero-emissions electricity producers (e.g. houses with solar panels) with 3 times the retail price for the power they generate. This means solar arrays are paid off in 5 years instead of 15, and Germany now has over 900MW of solar arrays (Australia is languishing at 40MW, despite having a lot more sun).
We have a five star energy rating - that encourages builders to provide good insulation. This existing compliance mechanism needs to be extended to cover:
* energy usage
* energy production (as in Germany where houses must produce of their energy requirements)
* passive solar design (north facing glass, thermal mass, shading etc), required for 10 star
So getting the true cost of consumption visible will stop people imposing their own lifestyle footprints on everyone else via climate change.
It will be a tragedy if Australia loses the Great Barrier Reef, our snow and our low lying suburbs (such as Middle Park and Elwood) because we keep using too much dirty energy.
Think about what we can do, rather than what should be banned.
Howard is just about to bring in emissions trading and put a price on carbon, but it is likely he will set the bar to low. Erwin Jackson points out that if the carbon price is set too low, firms will put off investments in clean technology. Soft targets will give soft outcomes..
I predict Howard will go for $20 per tonne, maybe even less.
Bring on the global revolution of personal choice, with no heed to social or ecological consequences. That’ll stick it to the pseudo-left!
OK Peterc so your long list was pointless because what you really wanted to say was that you want higher prices imposed to cover the externalities of carbon.
This means that you want peoples general living standard lowered by more than you think Howard is prepared to do with $20 per ton. $50 is what you recommend. You want to see the reverse of the historical trends to lower the price of everything thus giving a higher standard of living. Petrol at $1.30 in your view is preferable to petrol at 75c for example.
You clearly approve of Turnbull’s tactical move on light globes (removing choice) but want something more strategic. ‘Tax em till it hurts’ is the expression your after I think.
So now tell me how you intend to sell this policy at this election. I predict that what you want to do is conceal these policies because you know they are electoral poison.