Like I’ve said before, if we want to change, we actually will need to change. Seems simple enough, right? But many in the “pro-cold-home” contingent of our building sector don’t want to change anything. Andrew Eagle from the NZ Green Building Council wrote a very terse essay for The Spinoff a couple of weeks ago. He was incensed that some representatives from the construction industry had managed to sit down with government officials to lobby for a delay in the implementation of improvements to H1 Energy Efficiency requirements.
Every home we build to a low standard will need to be retrofitted someday soon to help meet our climate obligations—and in the meantime, the occupants will have higher energy bills and a colder and less healthy home. Building new homes to a lower standard while claiming we need to retrofit older lower-performance stock is as crazy as it sounds.
Certainly, I’m frustrated that the mass of architects, designers, builders and product manufacturers in New Zealand that have been proactively working towards these new standards for the last year (and longer, in the case of many window manufacturers) could now have their improved designs, details and products put on ice.