March 2009
Update from One Brighton
Daniel Viliesid is the Sustainability Integrator at One Brighton. Talking with Nicole Lazarus, he brings us up to date on the latest progress on site:
"The external walls and the clay blocks are all complete. 60% of the wood fibre insulation and 50% of the render is up. 54 of the 172 apartments will be ready for handover this summer. The wood fired boiler is now on site, ready to be installed and commissioned over the next 2 months. The PV panels are installed and ready to be commissioned. The brown roof is there and ready to be seeded with the tailor-made Brighton seed mix. The in-vessel composting equipment known as Big Hanna has been ordered and will be delivered in 3 months.
"As with developments around the UK and in many parts of the world, property sales are slow but we still have a lot of visitors to our show flat and are receiving a lot of enquiries through our website; we are hoping the market will recover somewhat during the course of 2009."
Daniel also described for us some of the measures that have been taken at One Brighton to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions associated with the construction process. The main strategies were to:
- use energy efficient site cabins
- used electricity on site from guaranteed renewable sources
- use biodiesel to power the site generators.
Site cabins
The One Brighton site cabins use PEFC certified timber. They have higher than usual insulation levels and the doors are sealed with air tight tape to reduce heat loss. They have low flush toilets, low flow spray taps and very low water use urinals. They stopped short of double glazed windows on cost grounds but they have put up Carbon Trust reminder stickers on every light switch to help site staff remember to turn off the lights.
Denne Construction are the main contractors for the site who commissioned these cabins. They say they paid a bit more for these cabins but not a lot. They will keep them for use on future sites.
I asked Daniel about the contractual mechanism for making these special cabins happen. There are no off-the-shelf "eco site cabins" on the market. Daniel said that Denne were encouraged to make the cabins "consistent with One Planet Living principles" as part of the OPL Construction Plan. BQL and Daniel discussed what sort of measures this might mean and then Denne went to their site cabin supplier, explained what they were after and said "What can you do?" These pragmatically successful bespoke cabins were the result.
Renewable site electricity
Green electricity has been sourced by BioRegional Quintain through Good Energy Ltd who guarantee all electricity comes from renewable sources (mainly wind turbines). The business tariff for the site is 13.19p/kWh plus 17.94p/day standing charge.
Biodiesel generators
Daniel said, "Attempting to use biodiesel took a considerable effort. We were keen to ensure we were using biodiesel from waste cooking oil rather than virgin biodiesel, the latter being controversial in putting pressure on food prices by taking fertile land out of food production. Our supplier, 'Bionic Fuels' has a sourcing policy which is consistent with this approach. They collect waste cooking oil from the region and deliver it to site in vehicles running also on the same fuel!
Not only did we have to secure a reliable source of this waste cooking bio-diesel, but we also had to procure generators which were guaranteed for use with biodiesel. In particular natural rubber seals and pipes can deteriorate with biodiesel although newer generators tend to use synthetic seals and so it should be easier to secure these generators in future. The biodiesel also tended to cause filter problems particularly in cold weather as the biodiesel tends to start to solidify.
We started at 100% biodiesel when we started construction in Autumn 2007, but after a difficult winter, moved to 50% biodiesel / 50% mineral diesel in May 2008. However with very cold weather in winter 2008, our contractors had to move to 100% mineral diesel. We think the problem is that generators are not specifically designed for biodiesel.
As we hooked up with our green tariff electricity provider, the generators were taken off-site by Christmas 2008. Overall we used 54,000 litres of biodiesel and 34,000 litres of red diesel - so we had managed to achieve over a 50% reduction in use of mineral diesel for the generators. We estimate the overall carbon dioxide saving as being 90 tonnes."
Photos from One Brighton
PV and brown roof
Biomass boiler
MVHR system
Wood fibre insulation
General view of the site
Daniel Viliesid can be contacted at daniel.viliesid@bioregional-quintain.com.