The Problem with Net-Zero Buildings
(and the Case for Net-Zero Neighbourhoods)
It can be tough to make an individual building into a zero-energy building, while
working at the community scale can offer up opportunities for energy efficiency and
cost-effective renewable energy generation.
by Nadav Malin
Achieving a net-zero building with today’s technologies and occupant expectations is
hard. There are projects out there proving that it is possible—for the right building in
the right setting with the right team. But sometimes going after the goal of net-zero
energy use in the building can have unwanted side effects. For example, a low-rise
building on a low-density site will have a better chance of being net-zero with onsite
renewables, but that type of development is often known as “sprawl.” The investment
in dollars and resources to get to net-zero are significant and might be better spent
on more cost-effective energy saving options, such as a more efficient building
envelope or creating a district energy system that can serve an entire campus.
For all those reasons and more, some argue that while both have an important role
to play, it’s more useful and important to work toward net-zero-energy communities
rather than net-zero buildings. Individual high-performing buildings don’t mean so
much if the neighbourhood as a whole is wasteful, while if an entire community is
net-zero, that’s meaningful even if the individual buildings within it are not.
The Problem with Net-Zero Buildings
Net-zero energy is an ambitious goal for any building—one that can’t be achieved
without scrupulous attention to every aspect of a building’s design, construction, and
operation. Like the related goal of creating a carbon-neutral building, any net-zero
building has to first achieve significant load reductions and system efficiencies, and
then meet the remaining loads with onsite energy generation.
In some ways, net-zero is a tougher goal than carbon-neutral: by most definitions, a
project could become carbon-neutral using biofuels from offsite—that’s not as widely
recognized a solution for achieving net-zero. On the other hand, carbon calculations
often account for the energy and carbon expended to create a building—its
embodied carbon—which is not usually the case with net-zero energy.
Most buildings that generate their own energy do it with solar photovoltaics (PV). If
we assume that a building has only its roof area available for mounting PV, then a
single-storey building is much more likely to achieve net-zero than a high-rise. Even
if cost is not an obstacle and the building has a low profile, getting to net-zero means
that the solar panels can’t be shaded by trees or adjacent structures. That means
that sprawling suburban homes are much more likely to achieve the net-zero goal
than dense urban townhouses or apartments, and suburban office parks have a leg
up on central business districts. This is a problem we’ve seen before, according to
architect Muscoe Martin, AIA, former principal of M2Architects: “In the 1980s, a few
solar architecture pioneers like Doug Kelbaugh and Peter Calthorpe noted that most
of the highest–performing solar buildings were in rural or suburban locations,
ignoring transportation and infrastructure energy use.” Martin noted, “Single-scale
problem-solving leads to solutions that don’t always make sense.”
Opportunities with Communities
Neighbourhoods and communities, being larger than individual buildings, can
support many technologies for low-impact heating, cooling, and electricity generation
better and more cost-effectively. To some extent, this is simply a matter of scale:
combined heat and power systems are more efficient in larger sizes. Perhaps more
importantly, they can support dedicated operations and maintenance staff to keep
them working properly. The same is true for community-sized boilers, chillers, and
many other high-tech solutions.
Communities also have a mix of occupancies and uses, which can support more
efficient use of infrastructure and cascading uses of energy. Offices use most of their
energy by day and can go dark at night, while for residences it’s just the opposite.
That means that a single heating or cooling plant serving both can be not much
bigger than a plant serving just one of them. It is also sometimes possible to share
energy—using waste heat from data centres, for example, to heat water for use in
apartments.
A net-zero-energy community is not simply a collection of buildings that, taken
together, achieve the goal of net-zero energy. A community includes loads and
energy uses that are not often included in the equation for individual buildings, such
as wastewater treatment and other community infrastructure, not to mention
designing to support low-impact transportation options. These represent
opportunities for environmental gain that extend well beyond energy efficiency,
including water conservation, rainwater infiltration to reduce runoff, the social benefit
of reduced car dependence, and even urban agriculture for a local food economy.
All of these infrastructure and planning-scale issues directly or indirectly involve
energy use: wastewater and stormwater treatment have energy costs for the city;
transportation and transporting food both require fuel for vehicles. They are also tied
into quality-of-life issues that are best addressed at the neighbourhood scale—by
creating spaces that make dense, urban living appealing, for example.
It’s not all about technology and design, however. No matter how cleverly they are
built, we won’t have net-zero buildings or communities unless we change the way
that we live and work in them. That’s a challenge that we’re all facing together.
