Energy efficient design: more fun or boring?
This week, I (and a packed crowd at Seattle City Hall) heard Svend Auken, Denmark’s former minister for energy and the environment, speak about everything from energy to economics to the U.S.’s responsibility in a climate-conscious world (sign a post Kyoto agreement, lead the way).
Then, I sat down with him in a one-on-one interview to focus his attention a 
little bit more on buildings. What should we do, I asked? How should the construction industry attack the problem of a changing world?
His answer? Government.
Government, he said, needs to make very, very strict rules and make it clear to people what they want out of a building. A good way to encourage that, he said, is by requiring an energy goal per square foot of a building rather than a whole-building goal. Once the goal is set, the industry will follow.
Of course government in Denmark is managed differently than government in Seattle and Washington. On multiple occasions, for example, Diane Sugimura, DPD’s director, has expressed exasperation at creating a balance between energy codes and letting untested technologies be used. As a city government, she’s said, you don’t want to just start using something that might be more efficient but hasn’t been adequately tested. In Denmark, you can be fairly creative as long as you achieve the end energy goal.
But Auken said government has to be very strong on this. Yes, people will moan for a while, he said, but in the end it will make them more creative and will be more profitable (especially in an age of rising oil costs where energy bills are sure to “skyrocket”).
“Once you let architects think in terms of energy efficiency, they get more creative,” he said. “Architects love to do low energy, it’s so much more fun.”
How about it architects? Are energy efficient buildings (like London’s BedZED project above) more fun or a pain in the bum?
For more on Denmark, read my post from last week (click tag ‘Scandinavia’ below). For more on Auken’s talk, what Denmark did and how we could do it, check out my story here.
Tags: Denmark, Energy, Energy efficiency, Famous speakers, Scandinavia
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October 27th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
[...] Auken, the Danish gentleman who helped turn Denmark into the energy efficient country it is today. He passed away in August. When Auken was last in town in June of 2008, I had the honor of personally interviewing him after his talk at city hall. My story, available here, focuses on how Auken said green was a very tangible and possible thing as long as government set rules and got involved. He suggested rules regulating energy use per square foot of a building. I also blogged about our discussion here. [...]