Baxi focuses on zero carbon targets in the UK

With the public sector facing increasing pressure to reduce carbon emissions, Simon Osborne explains why 2010 is the year for microgeneration technology to take centre stage in social housing.

Half-way into 2010 and it's all change for the low carbon agenda.

The new Coalition Government has published its manifesto; a forthcoming Energy Bill has been announced in the Queen's speech, and David Cameron has promised the new Government will be the greenest ever.

However, despite these changes, it appears the aim of Government is still to cut emissions to meet UK carbon targets, with the Coalition's manifesto stating it will support an increase in the EU emission reduction target to 30 per cent by 2020.

The detail about how the Coalition Government will cut carbon emissions is still to be revealed in the forthcoming Energy Bill.

Although with UK homes accounting for nearly 30 per cent of our country's total carbon emissions, this will be a sector the Government will be keen to target.

Indeed, the last Government stated in its 2007 Energy White Paper that all new homes are to be zero carbon from 2016 onwards, which the new housing minister, Grant Shapps, has now confirmed is still the goal.

On the road towards reaching this target, 2010 is a decisive year, since the White Paper proposed that carbon emission standards for new homes be improved by 44 per cent in 2010, relative to the current 2006 standards.

Currently, the key regulatory mechanisms to ensure these targets are met is Part L1 of the building regulations, which comes into force in October 2010, and the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH), which requires developers to meet new energy targets for social housing.

Core to cutting the UK's carbon emissions, Part L's new Target Emission Rate (TER) represents a 25 per cent improvement over the previous regulations and is in line with achieving CSH Level 3.

Meanwhile, in addition to Design Submissions, Part L now includes As Built Submissions together with revised software outputs in SAP, the Government's preferred assessment methodology.

This will enable Building Control to check adherence of a specified heating and hot water system to the design.

The Design Limits for building services equipment are also being expanded to cover combined heat and power (micro-CHP), for the first time alongside other low and zero carbon (LZC) technologies.

The effect of these changes will be the wider adoption of micro-CHP units in new build and social housing projects keen to cut carbon emissions and meet the higher efficiencies of Levels 3 and 4 of the CSH.

Changes to Part L1 will also be reflected in the CSH to ensure the energy efficiency requirements contained within the Code, do not fall below the Part L1 2010 minimum standards.

These performance targets will remain in excess of the minimum needed to satisfy building regulations, and are considered to be best practice, technically feasible and within the capability of the UK building industry to provide.

Publicly funded homes have had to meet CSH Level 3 since April 2008, however, in 2010, public sector homes will be expected to meet Level 4.

Following that, all housebuilders will be required to meet Level 6 and deliver zero-carbon homes by 2016.

Since its introduction, the CSH has certainly accelerated the move towards micro-CHP and in view of the changes to Part L1 2010, this technology will prove an increasingly important option.

Another incentive to the wider adoption of micro- CHP, is provided by the new Feed-in Tariffs (FiT).

Strongly advocated by the Coalition Government, FiT features in its manifesto.

Effective from April 2010, FiT provides small-scale microgeneration technologies that generate electricity with a minimum of ten years guaranteed support payments for electrical generation.

The generation tariff, the price at which the electricity supplier will make a fixed payment to the householder for every kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity they generate, will be fixed at 10p per kWh for micro-CHP.

Products such as the Baxi Ecogen, the first, commercially available micro-CHP unit for the home, has received a boost following the changes to Part L and the introduction of the FiT.

(Around two thirds of a home's electricity demand can be generated by the Baxi Ecogen, with any surplus electricity returned to the grid and credited by the utility.) Meanwhile, the Renewable Heat Incentive, planned for introduction in April 2011, will reward users of biomass, solar thermal and heat pumps based on the assessed heat load of the dwelling.

The proposed figures are based on a defined payback period and will increase the take up of heat based renewables.

Simon Osborne is specification channel manager at Baxi Group.

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