Tuesday 28 August 2007

Rt Hon Helen Clark
Prime Minister

Speech at Seminar on:
Housing for the Future – Stepping Towards Carbon Neutrality

School of Architecture
Vivian St, Wellington

Tuesday 28 August 2007

Good morning.

It’s a pleasure for me open this seminar: Housing into the future – stepping towards carbon neutrality.

This is a subject which affects every New Zealander personally, and it’s important nationally as we become more aware of issues of climate change and sustainability.

Today’s seminar provides an overview of the world-leading research from the Household Energy End-use Project, as the basis for discussing how we can build healthier, warmer and more energy efficient homes. And through today’s programme, the linkages are made between the issues of carbon neutrality, domestic energy use, building design, and health status and social equity.

These linkages reinforce for us that sustainability is not only about having good environmental policies. We need to apply the concept of sustainability across economic, social, and cultural policies as well. All together, these are the four pillars of a sustainable nation.

I believe we can enhance our way of life, our standard of living, and the state of our environment by putting sustainability at the heart of our thinking and decision making.

Supporting families is a key goal for our government. In my view it’s impossible to over emphasise the importance of a home to a family. Our families, young and old, need homes which are affordable to keep warm, and healthy to live in. Such homes will also be less wasteful of energy

To design polices which reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions while also meeting our needs for energy services, we need good base data on how, where, and why energy is used. That is why the Household Energy End-Use Project (HEEP) is so important.

HEEP has taken twelve years to complete, and has collected fuel and energy end-use data from a random sample of close to 400 houses from Kaikohe to Invercargill.

- Data on more than 12,000 appliances has been collected;
- 440 hot water cylinders, 200 solid fuel burners and 175 LPG heaters were monitored, and;
- Over 100 people worked on the project and 1,100 house occupants were involved.

Based on scientifically and statistically rigorous monitoring and analysis, the research is unique. No other country has actually monitored the use of all residential fuels (electricity, natural gas, LPG, wood, coal, oil and solar water heating) and the end-uses they provide in such a large sample of homes.

The results give us fascinating insights into the energy use of New Zealanders. We learn, for example, that:

- televisions are our most popular appliance, with just under two per house, although the largest number in any one house was nine !
- light counts ranged from seven to 143 in one house.
- ninety per cent of houses had only one hot water cylinder, nine per cent had two, and one per cent had three cylinders.

Overall, the information gathered has contributed to improving our understanding of residential energy use. The results have been used by the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), and by the Department of Building and Housing (DBH) in the 2007 review of the NZ Building Code.

I congratulate the agencies which funded and managed the HEEP project : Building Research and the Foundation for Research Science and Technology. I also acknowledge the work of the whole HEEP team, many of whom are here today. Special thanks are due to statistician John Jowett and Mark Bassett, Andrew Pollard, Nigel Isaacs and Albrecht Stoecklein who started the project at BRANZ.

Researching household energy use is important for planning future energy supply and demand, and energy efficiency and conservation strategies. The Ministry of Economic Development, estimates electricity used in the residential sector accounts for 44 petajoules per annum, which equates to about 33 per cent of New Zealand’s electricity use.

To put that in context, just one petajoule is roughly equivalent to:

- the electricity used in Nelson in a year
- a coastal tanker load of 25,000,000 litres of oil
- or around 10 days' output from the Huntly power station at full capacity.

When you consider those numbers it quickly becomes clear that making our homes more energy efficient can act to reduce demand for energy and our greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reducing energy costs for families.

The potential to save energy, improve health and lower household power costs is driving the changes the government is making to the Building Code.

One of the purposes of the Building Act, is to ‘promote sustainable development.’ We want the Building Code to support :

- the efficient use of energy and the use of renewable energy in buildings.
- the efficient and sustainable use of materials and material conservation in buildings.
- the efficient use of water and water conservation in buildings, and,
- the reduction in the generation of waste during construction.

The first outcomes of the Building Code review were announced earlier this year. Much stronger requirements for insulation and double glazing in new homes are being introduced, along with new requirements for energy efficient lighting in commercial buildings, and streamlined processes for installing solar water heating.

The impact of these changes will be substantial. For example, the insulation and double glazing requirements for new homes will cut the amount of energy needed to achieve healthy indoor temperatures by around thirty per cent. These changes have a pay back period of between two and seven years and will save households between $760 and $1800 per year.

Hot water consumes around a third of household energy. As solar hot water systems can considerably reduce hot water energy costs, our government has a $15.5 million programme aimed at getting an additional 15,000 – 20,000 units in homes by 2010. Annual sales of solar heating units are up about 400 per cent on the total five years ago.

Consultation has just concluded on further changes to the Building Code which would set higher energy efficiency standards for domestic hot water systems, and also for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems in new and retrofitted buildings.

As well, the new requirements for more energy efficient lighting in commercial buildings are expected to save $8 million a year in energy costs nationally.

But our efforts to promote more energy efficient homes and buildings do not stop at the building code.

Lighting accounts for around eight per cent of total household energy use. The Electricity Commission is now promoting the replacement of conventional light bulbs with energy savings ones which use around one fifth of the energy. By June this year, the sale of 2.4 million energy saving bulbs had been facilitated by the Commission, with the expectation of another 3.4 million sales facilitated this financial year.

Then there is the work of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Agency on the impact of electrical appliances and refrigeration on energy use. Currently they account for 23 per cent of household energy use. The introduction of Minimum Energy Performance Standards for these from 2002 are estimated to have saved electricity worth around $60 million. Under today’s minimum standards , a modern refrigerator uses 25 per cent less energy than its five year old equivalent, and fifty per cent less energy than its ten year old equivalent.

As everyone here will appreciate, warmer and more energy efficient homes can substantially improve the quality of life and the health and social outcomes for families, as well as reducing costs.

A study by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand in 2001 estimated that asthma costs New Zealand around $825 million a year in terms of medical expenses and days off work. It is the most common cause of hospital admissions and is responsible for 500,000 lost school days each year.

Researchers at the University of Otago’s Wellington School of Medicine have studied the benefits of retrofitting the homes of people suffering from respiratory illnesses. They identified substantial benefits, including improvements in health and reduced numbers of days off work and school. Retrofitting was estimated to lead to health savings of up to $2,600 per household over the life of the measures. That was in addition to energy cost savings.

Earlier this year I visited the 30,000th house to receive an Energywise Homes Grant from the Government. Under the scheme, the government, through EECA, partners with local organisations to deliver insulation and energy efficiency retrofits to low and modest income people in cold homes. With stepped up funding, this programme is now running at 12,000 retrofits per annum.

As well, the Ministry of the Environment is funding 800 retrofits per annum in areas of low air quality. And Housing New Zealand also has a programme of retrofitting state housing.

In this years Budget, $23 million was allocated for an interest free loans scheme which is currently being designed to help a wider range of households get their homes retrofitted.

Clearly improving household energy efficiency is vital if New Zealand is to build a sustainable and carbon neutral future. But what we can achieve with and for our households needs to be supplemented by efforts in the public and private sectors.

The government is taking steps to put its own house in order. In February I announced a programme to require the core public service to becoming carbon neutral over time. Six departments are to achieve carbon neutrality by 2012, and all others must have developed a carbon neutrality plan by then. Energy efficiency in departments will be central to these plans.

Earlier this year we also announced that :

 government departments will adopt a minimum 5 Star Green Star New Zealand rating for the construction of new Grade A office buildings, and

 all new government buildings are to meet a minimum 6 star rating from 2012.

Government has also been designing an emissions trading scheme which will, in time, cover all sectors and all gases. Decisions on that will be announced in coming weeks.

We are also finalising the New Zealand Energy Strategy. Our challenge is to provide enough energy to meet the needs of a growing economy, maintain security of supply, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Increasing the uptake of cost effective energy efficiency and conservation measures is a focus of the Energy Strategy’s companion document, the New Zealand Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy, which is also close to being finalised.

Sustainability and carbon neutrality are the common threads which bring emissions trading, the NZES, and NZEECS together. It’s easy to set an arbitrary target for emissions reductions decades into the future, but doing so is meaningless without a well thought out plan to achieve it. Emissions trading, the programmes laid out in the NZES and NZEECS, plus other policies like those to change the Building Code and promote home retrofits are all part of our plan.

There is a lot of fresh and bold thinking around how we advance our sustainability vision. For example, earlier this month the Minister for Building and Construction, Clayton Cosgrove, announced a new approach to developing the Building Code. The concept is to look at the operation
of buildings over their entire life, covering the overall carbon cost of producing, maintaining and using new buildings – the so-called ‘embodied’ energy of a building. This would be a new measure for building codes internationally. Further work is being done on how embodied energy could be calculated and how the concept could work in practice.

This year’s Budget also announced funding for the design and trialing of a Home Energy Rating Scheme, which could eventually become mandatory. Under such a scheme, home owners would get an assessment by an accredited agency of the home’s energy efficiency at the time of sale.

There has never been a better time to discuss how to improve the energy efficiency of our homes. Doing so not only saves households money – it also helps save the planet, and we gain the health benefits of having warmer homes.

Government accepts its share of the responsibility for making the necessary changes. Working together with other funders and using our power to develop and implement good policy, I believe we can make a substantial difference for the better.

Thank you, and best wishes for today’s conference.

INTRODUCTION OF PROFESSOR ROBERT SOCOLOW

It is now my pleasure to introduce Professor Robert Socolow from Princeton University. Professor Socolow is the co-Director of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, a $20-million dollar, ten-year project of co-ordinated research into environmental science, energy technology, geological engineering, and public policy to find solutions to the challenge of global warming.

Thirty years ago Professor Socolow led one of the first studies of household energy use at Twin Rivers, New Jersey. At that time it was said that ‘we knew more about the thermal and environmental behaviour of a spaceship than we did about a domestic dwelling.’ Thanks to the work of Dr Socolow, and more recently of projects such as HEEP, I am pleased to say we now have the information to make good decisions.

ENDS

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