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Comment by erpellan | Hacker News Reader

We already have the technology to build net zero carbon buildings. But the building trade is both notoriously conservative and extremely effective at lobbying to protect their profits (at least in the UK).

Superinsulated, almost airtight houses with ground and air source heat pumps and solar PV should be mandatory, as should banning of all in home boilers in new builds.

That’s all easily achievable even without some of the recent novel inventions such as engineered wood: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25476

We have to stop treating the atmosphere as a free line of credit with no limit that we can just dump all our externalities into, or we’ll find out very soon that there is no such thing as an externality at planetary scale. We’re all in the same hermetically sealed box, breathing each other’s farts.

Sorry for the rant. It’s hard to stop once the despair creeps in.

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It’s more cost effective to use solar hot water heaters than crazy amounts of insulation in a wide range of climates. Which is one reason regulations should focus on outcomes not methiods.

How do you measure the outcomes? It seems easier to me to change regulations depending to local climate.

It's far harder to change regulations once new technology comes into the market. There is always a delay between introduction and legalization, and sometimes it doesn't happen at all.

Remember,the beneficiaries of the old system will be lobbying to prevent progress.

For a trivial example, direct manufacturer car sales are effectively banned in many US states. Dealerships are an entrenched and hated third party.

They exist out of "concerns" about rural car maintenance. If there had been a law that mandated X percentage of the population must have a way to repair their car within Y miles, that would have been less distortionary.

The average American drives something like 13k miles per year, and modern cars tend to not need an oil change for 10k miles or even longer. Tires last for years. Other maintenance is less frequent.

Meanwhile in the 60s you'd change your oil every 3k miles. I'm sure in the 20s or 30s you'd have all kinds of maintenance to do

This concern about maintenance is obviously not as critical as it was in the 20s and 30s when these laws were created.

100 years of technical progress with little to no legal progress.

In this particular case - taxing [carbon footprint of] electricity at source and letting the market do it's magic.

As a bonus point: taxes can be redistributed equally to citizens so it's revenue neutral.

I'm in favor of a carbon tax, but I believe it would need to be too high at this point to effect change with the necessary speed. Imo a combination of price signals and regulation is needed.

In a wide range of climates, maybe, but in northern Europe, in winter, that is not going to give you a lot of hot water.

On the other hand, if I'm trying to keep a volume cold for as long as possible, how can I do that without "crazy amounts of insulation"?

I can use a Stirling engine driven by the solar gain to run a heat pump to push the temperature gradient, but I still need a large-ass amount of insulation to beat the radiating heat creeping into the cold volume.

Lots of HVAC discussions revolve around keeping people comfortable and happy, but I'm trying to figure out how to keep a cold space at that set point regardless of what goes on outside it. And if your definition of "crazy amounts" includes cost, then aerogel-core vacuum insulated panels are right out (though in terms of volume occupied, they're nifty, but only a 50 year lifecycle unfortunately).

The cost effectiveness of insulation is a function of the cost of solar power which has been dropping. The most efficient ratio 10 years ago is now outdated.

Further, heat transfer is only half the story. A delta of 100f vs 72f is the same as 44f vs 72f which is not that cold. What makes AC consume so much energy is dehumidifying the air, and that varies wildly. That and everything heating the space like people and electronics is helpful in the cold and counterproductive in the heat.

Clearly there is always some value in more insulation, it’s simply less important than generally assumed.

Aha, I see where we are coming at this from different angles. Thanks for your feedback.

I'm looking for designs that incorporate passive elements that last ideally 100+ years that are reusable in modular sections, amortizing cost-effectiveness over generations. For that criteria, below-frost-line earth-covered, foamed glass building envelopes meets my requirements, and I'm happy to set aside 6-12 feet of foamed glass insulation after digging down enough to get below the frost line to achieve the thermal control I'm seeking.

I'm looking for dehumidification to consistently 5-8%, with temperature in deep freeze range (-30 to -50°C).

I've so far been stumped finding someone who has already, or figuring out myself how to passively (or with about the energy consumption of a Pi Zero per day) capture and use elsewhere the heat hitting panels to manage their thermal cycling. Nor have I been able to find a self-cleaning (superhydrophobic and/or appropriate wettability) coating that can be lifecycle rated to the timeframe I'm seeking. I think if we can control those, then solar panel lifetimes can be extended to 100 years at 20% degradation ("80% 'efficiency'").

Unfortunately, I've been stymied trying to find the lifespan of gallium-arsenide solar panels. Probably because their three-order of magnitude cost differential limiting them mostly to outer space applications where the weight-to-efficiency savings are the primary design motivator, and no one particularly cares about lifespan as long as it outlasts the design life of the satellite, which is way less than the 100+ years I'm seeking.

Solar panels already have a pretty decent LifeCycle Assessment compared to coal and natural gas, though their de-manufacturing/re-manufacturing tech is still at a nascent stage. I simply have a different goal than most people with my requirements for long duration lifespans.

Do mandated green initiatives in this vein have a history of eating into the profits of construction companies in the UK?

At a naive, laymen’s first glance I’d imagine it creates opportunity for more!

The ideal situation for a construction company is where the house they sell has the best cost to manufacture / sale price ratio. People buy houses without living in them first, so the best strategy is to build a house that is very cheap, but is visually impressive.

Consequently, developers tend to build houses that are barely functional as such, with all sorts of damp/heating/basic liveability problems, but which look impressive.

Green initiatives are a sort of nightmare for developers, because the energy efficiency of a house is a cold, uninteresting metric that is not immediately present to the potential buyer.

Consider windows, for example. In an unregulated market, the cheapest, most crappy windows are absolutely the optimal choice for a developer. The fact that they are going to be drafty, break within the first few months, and quickly become covered in mold is simply impossible for a buyer to know, before they've lived in the house for a year or so.

Green windows, however, have to meet energy efficiency ratings - which means they must actually work. They have to keep cold out and heat in, or vice-versa. They can't be giant condensators. They probably don't look quite so pretty, and much worse, they are far more expensive. So the developer actually loses perceived property value, while paying more!

This happened to a family member, looked great, expensive looking house and high price, but shoddy work, all sorts of basic problems with the house in the first year.

I wonder if this couldn't be mitigated somewhat by a clause that makes the developer liable for all problems in the first year. (I know one potential loophole would be that the developer could use a proxy to "buy" from themselves and hold for a year, but it seems like that could be appropriately handled through existing or minimally altered fraud laws.) It's hard to see how we could get from our present situation to something like that, but it might improve craftsmanship, but would also make new houses even more expensive.

New builds will already come with a guarantee. In the short term the developer will send someone to fix issues and may well still have people working on site. In the long term there will be insurance policy. But it just happens that there is sometimes an economic incentive to accept lower quality in order to meet some other objective. Maybe the electrical contractor put in a low bid and wants to finish the job. Or maybe the developer is running low on cash within the project budget. Or perhaps the project manager is under pressure to hit a target.

Developers are just like any other complex corporation. Quality is just one thing that has to be balanced. And it is a market with massive pent up demand and buyers everywhere. And customers who have very little choice after they have signed on the dotted line.

A lot of it also has to do with a broken court system.

I now live in the Netherlands, and in the 80s, developers also started to pull this shit. Soon the lawsuits came, and very quickly they learned not to do this.

Most Dutch people have both comprehensive house insurance _and_ legal insurance!

I've lived through this and seen this in histories of home purchases. It's the reason I don't recommend buying a brand new home unless you oversaw its construction.

The ideal situation in my experience is to find a home maybe 10 years old. Problems don't necessarily become evident the first year.

Then again homes of any age have issues creep in, so maybe there's always risks.

Humans won't get it until they get their faces rubbed in it, and then it will be decades too late.

We are evolved to react incredibly well at about a 100ms threshold. Through agriculture, humans have taught themselves to plan in terms of a whole year. Beyond that people can't really understand.

If you offered most people this deal, "I'll give you $10 billion today but in exchange the whole world is destroyed 150 years from now," I think 90% of humans would take it.

"I'll be dead anyway."

I would take it because there's no way the person offering could build a system (human or technological) that would last 150 years. Because you're right about the ability of humans to plan that far ahead.

I agree with everything except the blanket need to make all of these things mandatory without some sort of aid (such as a subsidy) and the bit about banning home furnaces. Homes built today might not be around by the time the grid is carbon neutral. Burning fuel for heat is absurdly thermodynamically efficient compared to burning fuel to heat water to spin a turbine to induce a current to push electrons around over miles to resistively heat a coil. The grid has a very long way to go before home furnaces become less pollutant than home electric heaters.

Wikipedia claims:

The COP for heat pumps range from 3.2 to 4.5 for air source heat pumps to 4.2 to 5.2 for ground source heat pumps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump

Whereas a resistive heat coil has a COP 1.

A heat pump could never bring water up to 120F.

Whenever you believe you are so certain of a thing that you’re prepared to say something like “x could never do y” you should search the internet for x doing y.

Heat pump water heaters for either space heating or hot water production are most certainly a product you can buy today.

Eg, Rheem sell these two models in Australia https://www.rheem.com.au/products/residential/heat-pumps

I think one point of the article is that there are few structural incentives for adoption of these sorts of technologies. It's let up to the good will of the consumer, who in almost all cases has to spend a lot more for what is an external benefit.

For another example, I subscribe to Ethical Consumer magazine [1], who rate products and companies on everything from carbon impact to animal use/abuse to tax avoidance. Invariably, the most ethical products are the most expensive. It simply costs more when you don't externalize negative effects. So the products are there, but they're only purchased by the small cross section of folks who can afford to and choose to essentially double their cost of living. What we need is (at the very least) societal, structural incentives towards more ethical capitalism.

[1] https://www.ethicalconsumer.org

There is also the aspect that "responsible" companies know that they cater to affluent consumers and simply can afford to charge more. Vegetarian products for example shouldn't be more expensive than meat, because the raw materials are quite cheap compared to raising animals, yet they usually cost more.

It’s really hard to compare, as everything related to food is subsidized and distorted to some degree today.

HFCS is more expensive to make than sugar, but it is cheaper in the US (and through exports this bleeds to other places) due to corn subsidies.

Similarly, there are a lot of meat subsidies and oil subsidies - to the point that market pricing only matter within small sectors, but not replacement sectors that aren’t the same commodity.

Oat milk may be inherently cheap, but building an oat milk factory is still expensive. Beyond meat factories and their supply chains are even more expensive to develop. Buying them now means you're subsidizing them for the future. Obviously, vegan companies still want profit, but regular food always makes more money than niche luxury food.

An oat milk factory would be importing bulk quantities of oats and flavoring agents like cinnamon, vanilla, maple syrup (which maybe be processed by expensive factories). I would just be going out and buying these things separately and tossing it in a blender with random measurements until it tasted the way I like. No factory required for me. T'would be even better to grow the ingredients myself, but I do not think a vanilla bean vine tolerates low temperatures. Same with cinnamon. Oats would be easiest to grow, and I'd imagine there would be some threshing and winnowing involved (manual labor opportunity). Might as well let the combines and tractors harvest millions of bushels and I just spend my nations currency to acquire a 50 lb bag every few months (storage in cool/dry place).

I suppose purchasing a colorful carton adorned by lots of writing in the "Vegan Isle" of a grocery store could be an easier way because the aforementioned steps may be far too time consuming for most people who want everything pre-prepared for them by a favorite brand and stored in plastic/cardboard/glass individual packaging.

Meat is a different story, because coordinating the grazing routines, herding (some canine breeds are helpful for this), winter hay feeding stockpile, veterinary treatments, calf birthing, nutrition feed deficiency compensation, slaughter (bolt-gun to forehead is most humane), blood drain (good composting material), and butchering into desired cuts would be consuming much more time than available in a highly specialized life.

Solar panels and heat pumps sound expensive, and it feels like that’s laying the burden on the landlords to install these technologies.

Wouldn’t it be more productive to centralize an efficient form of power generation, and let the consumers choose how much they can afford to pay for through their electricity meters?

Isn’t that completely missing the point laid out in the paper?

The paper is say that those who have more money pollute more and consume more resources. Your solution seems to be to let people with more money consume more resources, rather than building more efficient buildings that reduces everyone’s resource consumption.

In the context of the cost of a building, the cost of these elements is near-insignificant. Less true if you're retrofitting them to an existing building, but for new builds (which is what OP suggested) they ought to be mandatory.

IIRC there is a limiting factor with (ground-based) heat-pumps, though... the in-earth elements can't be placed too close to each other before they lose efficiency badly through competition for the same heat energy stocks. (Somebody who knows more about this should correct me.)

>In the context of the cost of a building, the cost of these elements is near-insignificant.

The same could be said of 99% of building code requirements...and it adds up.

Houses in Europe have such building code requirements and yet don't seem outrageously expensive by any means.

Shock! It turns out that doing it right at scale just isn't much harder, and pays society back in spades over the life of the building.

> let the consumers choose how much they can afford to pay

The article you're commenting under talks about why this leads to poor outcomes.

Superinsulated houses are in practice a fad. Build as usual just with thick polystyrene insulation (afaik not recyclable) on the facade vulnerable to moisture when the surface is punctured (possible with a fingernail). It also requires air recirculation which is too prone to moisture.

Use mineral wool instead of polystyrene, also for fire safety.

Anyway, nearly zero-energy buildings are now mandated for all new buildings in the EU, so hardly a fad.

I am living in the EU and writing from personal experience. Fad is fad even if it makes it into law. Mineral wool has other disadvantages.

But we digress, I am firmly convinced that such narrow focus on energy efficiency of buildings to the detriment of other things is exactly the "affluent" technological solution the paper is critical about.

I understand that, but also think what makes it a not-fad is that EU does not have a lot of its own energy sources and winters can be hard. So to me it makes sense to try to be as energy efficient as possible and also not send a lot of money to e.g. Russia if it's avoidable. I also understand that constructing low-energy buildings is much harder than the standard ones. But I fully believe that science and engineering, when given such task, can master that, given enough time.

It's not so hard, but EU is so far removed from practice that it can't set up the incentives right. There's a parallel with EU's policy on biomass energy that ended up (partially) driving deforestation here in Slovakia.

The push for greener homes produces living environments which are just fragile, full stop. For example, they're 100% reliant on grid electricity for heating, ventilation, cooking, etc whereas older and less efficient homes usually aren't. This is happening at the same time as there's a push to loosen up on grid robustness in the name of greener electricity. That does not seem like a good combination.

In addition to that, buildings should be made to last. Badly designed or built houses can be just ticking time-bombs for mold and other air-quality issues, and certainly not sustainable.

On the contrary, it is not possible to foresee kind of houses and places people will want to live in 50 years in the future. So,it makes much more sense to make it easy to tear down and rebuild houses-aiming for reusable (like brick) or biodegradable (like untreated wood) building materials.

> On the contrary, it is not possible to foresee kind of houses and places people will want to live in 50 years in the future.

People have been doing it and usually getting it right for millenia. 38% of the UK's housing stock dates from before 1946; much more than was built in the last forty years.

And one of the few really consistent objections to older buildings is 'the architects assumed nobody would still be living in it fifty years later'...

Not sure on getting it right. Old houses in the UK are a nightmare in term of thermal and sound insulation (basically none). Sure, it protects your head from the rain (when it doesn’t leak). But in a discussion about consuming less energy, thery are pretty much a counter-example of what to do.

it is possible to build sustainable and to last, while at the same time be easy to tear down and reuse.

one key seems to be to avoid concrete.

broad.com, a company in china, has developed a lightweight, energyefficient, durable, and reusable way to build using steel.

i am pretty sure there are others out there with other good alternatives

You can design buildings built to last and simultaneously reuse with little to zero waste far into the future. But it is much more expensive, because the current economic-political order favors externalizing tons of costs onto the environment and into the future.

Example. Concrete foundations don't have to be slabs that are torn up when a new house is built on the lot with a different footprint. They're just cheaper that way. You can instead use a modular foundation if you are willing to pay for it and give up flexibility in foundation footprints. Design the modules using 800 MPa ultra-high strength pozzolanic concrete, pre-stressed basalt fiber reinforcement, and carbon fiber reinforcing filaments, with basalt ducts for carbon fiber post-tensioning cables to connect the modules together, all covered on the envelope with foamed glass insulation to protect from UV.

A foundation system like this would have a lifecycle rated in multiple hundreds of years. Might have to replace the carbon fiber post-tensioning cables sooner than 100 years, but we're still figuring out the lifecycle of those; they're rated about the same as steel as far as we know from current lifecycle testing, possibly longer because they aren't subject to the corrosion concerns of steel, but no one knows for sure yet.

You'd be able to repurpose these modules indefinitely. If foundations like these were commonplace in average residential and commercial buildings, breaking out the jackhammers to toss out a foundation would only be reserved for one-off projects where the compressive load far exceeds what these could take. Used for just your average residential projects, and they'd be fine from SFH up to mid-rise multifamily projects; I'd have to retain and pay structural and civil engineers to figure out what these could ultimately take.

Such a foundation though, is fantastically expensive compared to how we currently build foundations. If you put a gun to my head to force a guess, I'd pluck an order of magnitude out of thin air. I wouldn't be surprised if it is acutally more. I can't even find someone who makes basalt post-tensioning ducts that are textured on the surface to simultaneously serve as reinforcing rods.

I'd like to eventually see if carbon nanotube-based cables can be used for filaments and post-tensioning, possibly pre-tensioning, as carbon fiber manufacturing emits lots of CO2 while there are some interesting processes shown in the lab for making carbon nanotubes that consume CO2.

Concrete and foundation companies wouldn't like it if their customer base shrunk to only bespoke foundation gigs for megascale projects and new customers needing new modular foundation modules. If common foundations were like this, we'd be used to thinking of foundations as some object we simply pass along for multiple generations, and re-purpose as modules across that entire timespan. The amount of concrete manufactured per year after the initial production of modules is satisfied would be alarming to many in the concrete and related industries (don't forget n-th order effects onto real estate and finance among others, for example). I don't even know if we have enough volcanic basalt to satisfy global demand.

I'm living in a seventy-year old building - maybe older. It's just lovely, I can't say enough good things about it. It has new windows and such, of focurse.

Do it right in the first place and it will be livable forever.

People are physical beings with well-known needs - warmth, protection from the elements, water and plumbing, privacy, comfort, sunlight, air, lack of health risks (fire, unsafe water, outgassing materials, damp, mold, etc).

A good solution to this problem will be a good solution a century from now, with minor modifications.

People should be less into ripping things up just because they get bored with them. Even if we reuse materials, the environmental cost of a new building is huge.

Do you think majority of people living in 70+ year old houses have such luck that it satisfies everything you write about? Considering people I know, I doubt it. The upkeep can require as big expenses (not just financial, also environmental) as tearing down and building anew.

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