green star | SIMON WILD

Is sustainability still sustainable – don’t take the fool’s gold and prepare for our unsustainability

I am still only on chapter 1 and this book is blowing my mind. This post offers a few thoughts on finishing chapter 1 as well as some food for thought about the property industry’s ‘fool’s gold’. A kind reader pointed out that I had got the name of the book wrong in the post […]

What is sustainability – The pitfalls of carbon as a proxy for our buildings performance

“Sometimes we can’t measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that’s much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation” – have we done this with carbon emissions as a measurement for sustainability in the built environment? And if we have, what implications does gaming the proxy have on our built […]

Tri Harder The Final Chapter – Why do we have so many trigen systems and 6 reasons to install one

So what has driven the recent plethora of trigeneration systems? Why do we put them into buildings? Will there be more trigeneration systems in the future? I’ve covered a lot about trigeneration from Part 1 of Tri Harder where I talked about the different carbon intensities of grid electricity around the world to Part 6 […]

Tri Harder Part 6 – What about flue emissions and maintenance?

Many, many years ago we moved our power generation from being within the city to being outside the city – driven by air quality, expanding populations and access to coal. But what about air quality from trigeneration systems, should we be worried about it? I’ve covered a lot about trigeneration from Part 1 of Tri […]

Green ratings what’s the point – online survey

I ran a couple of workshops for Green Building Week 2013 that asked the question – Green Ratings What’s the Point. We asked the question from two viewpoints – what changes had green ratings changed in the last 10 years and then what did changes did we want green ratings to change over the next […]

Tri Harder Part 5 – What happens if the carbon intensity of the grid improves?

As more and more people becoming aware and believe in global warming the greater emphasis will be placed on action to decarbonise our grid. But what does that mean to trigeneration systems if the carbon intensity of the grid improves? In Part 1 of Tri Harder I talked about the different carbon intensities of grid […]

Tri Harder – Part 4, Why do we consider carbon payback?

What is carbon payback and why do we consider it? We tend to focus primarily on operational energy and carbon in the property industry forgetting about the carbon associated with the manufacture and installation of building components. The amount of information and awareness of carbon emissions is increasing at a rapid rate. We can now […]

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