WEEK 4 Pre-session

Review of Are we ready for zero carbon buildings?

This article demonstrates the definition of zero carbon buildings, which is also known as ‘carbon zero’, ‘carbon neutral’, ‘zero energy’ or ‘zero emission’, and some of the issues which should be considered. It refers to the building which use the renewable energy on the site resulting in an equal net amount of energy or the net energy that the building took.

In addition, the construction of zero carbon buildings contains various technologies. As the example illustrated in the article, the Josh’s House, it represents 10 star energy house with comparable cost. The main design principle includes the solar passive approach which maximizing the thermal comfort of the building without additional air-conditioning and heating facilities.

However, future of zero carbon need a strong support of government and industry as the new zero carbon buildings were fail due to the increase cost and regulation in UK in 2016.

Therefore, I believe that the passive solar design could be a basic design principle of housing design in terms of orientation and planning, to reduce the energy consumption and the cost of that amount of energy. However, the zero carbon design is not suitable for all projects, such as some of the high rise buildings. On the grounds that the the photovoltaic system is much harder to installed in the high rise buildings. And the energy consumption is quite large. Then, in some of the design, the materials could increase the embodied energy.