Houses in Solar Avenue, Leeds, require as little as one tenth of the energy consumed by a conventional home. Photo Credit: Citu
Environment United KingdomLatest Eco Trend: Low-Energy Houses
With as many as 30,000 low-carbon homes projected all across the United Kingdom, low-energy housing is all the rage, and housing companies multiply to meet demand.
“It’s an amazing story,” says Clara Bagenal George, environmental engineer and founder of the London Energy Transformation Initiative, about the low-energy standard the Passivhaus project established more than a decade ago. “The industry defined ‘good’, over and above the regulations, and within a year there are now tens of thousands of homes in the works that meet this standard. It shows we can do it.”
Today, many companies follow on the heels of Exeter City Living, the housing company behind Passivhaus, like Leeds-based Citu: its terrace houses use 10 times less energy than a conventional house, to a point where the excess energy from their solar panels feeds a community power grid and powers electric cars. Low-energy housing projects are underway in Norwich, York, Oxford, and Wales.
