My concerns over the ability of Wales to achieve its zero carbon dream by 2012 appear to be shared by the political community. According to a news item on the Energy Saving Trust website our Housing and Planning minister Margaret Beckett has decided that the meaning of ‘zero carbon’ is now to be re-evaluated.
“We need a revolution in the ways in which we plan, design and construct our buildings.
“They currently account for nearly half of all our carbon emissions. If we could improve construction methods, the ways in which we heat, light and power our homes, then we would make huge strides towards our overall ambitions.”
Quite how this redefinition of zero carbon can be done is not clear, I can only imagine that we’ll have a watered down version, one in which energy saved (that would traditionally have been wasted) may have a feed into the equation. I also suspect that the carbon invested in construction of the building that would need to be paid back through renewable energy generation in the traditional definition may somehow be removed from consideration. I’m certainly interested to see where this one goes…
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