Setting the standard

I spent an hour on Friday morning having a tour of the new Environment Agency building - Horizon House. It's the one next to the Council House and vaguely opposite the Cathedral.

The building has achieved an Outstanding rating for sustainability from BREEAM and was winner of the Office Building of the Year award last year. It makes it the most energy efficient large building in Bristol and one of the best in the country. I am hoping that Bristol can use it as a sort of 'showhome' for doing energy efficiency properly in office buildings.

The building has some very impressive green kit: a massive ground source heat pump system, solar PV and hot water (see pic) arrays, rainwater capture and a passive cooling system. They are getting about 30% of their energy from renewables, putting them in advance of the 20% target recently adopted by the Council.

However, for me, the most interesting thing for me was the way in which they were spending almost as much effort on dealing with how humans engage with the building in order to cut energy usage. This ranged across issues like providing free milk instead of fridges, controlling the ambient temperature, switching to low energy hand dryers in the toilets and so on. Things that any office can do, but most don't.

This fits into a theme that I've been interested in for a while, which is how we make sure that green kit provides the energy savings that we expect of it. We are beginning to learn that people don't always act rationally when, for example, a house gets energy efficiency improvements. Instead of cutting their energy use, they often opt for warmer houses and/or more gadgets.

We therefore need to keep pushing culture change alongside technological solutions to climate change. A good example is the Make Your Home Eco course that's being hosted at the CREATE Centre starting next week - still time to book up!