The latest belch of warm air from the government’s Climate Change Advisory Body claims that developers have been cheating on energy efficiency standards, resulting in owners paying over the odds for their energy bills.
The answer to this could only have come from bureaucrats getting high on quango fumes. In order to help Britain’s legally binding emissions target objectives, gas boilers and cookers are to be banned from new homes within six years. Developers will be forbidden from connecting new homes to the gas grid and forced to install low-carbon heating systems such as heat pumps combined with extra insulation. This would cost up to £5000 more for each home.
I have never heard such a load of eco-friendly hogwash in all my life. It typifies the ignorance of the plywood munchers, these unwashed bullies who a) lack an understanding of the fundamentals of engineering and b) have a sinister agenda to deprive us all of the most fundamental of human needs, i.e. power generation.
Example of what happens in actuality
Let me give you an example of what happens in actuality, rather than slavish attendance to the witterings of these misguided, high-handed numpties who have never met the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Take Lexington Place, NW11. This is a brand new development by Affinity Sutton of around 60 flats in northwest London, on the Finchley Road near Golders Green. The environmentalists at Barnet council (i.e. hippie fascists with negligible social skills) pressured developers – you know, those who actually came up with the investment and labour – to use communal central heating and hot water systems instead of gas boilers in each apartment.
In order to carry the hot water pipes over long runs of pipe work from the central boiler to each apartment, there were attendant heat losses so severe that some of the communal areas were 90 degrees in the summer. Every attempt has been made to re-lag the pipes, a policy as expensive as it is belated.
This problem is suffered by the entire development. Ironically, it’s led to more energy use, because many residents have had to put on the air-conditioning ahead of time. It hasn’t done re-sales any favours either.
Wouldn’t it have been so much simpler, cheaper and more environmentally friendly if every apartment had had its own, independently controllable heating system?
In the delusional rush to reduce our carbon footprint to that of a Neolithic cave-dweller, theory has taken precedence over pragmatism. All in the name of meeting externally imposed international standards.
Impeded by the green menace
Sound-minded developers trying to repair this country’s broken housing market are impeded by the green menace, which obstructs worthwhile planning applications for the building of new homes.
Currently, the ideologues are in charge of the asylum. You don’t need to be a Trump-inspired zealot to realise that if this planning quagmire isn’t drained sharpish, the target of 300,000 new homes per annum will be merely vegan pie in the sky. The sooner someone with clout puts these lunatics in a hessian straitjacket, the better.
Has anyone been born yet who has bothered to read an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) on any property? It’s a meaningless pile of data but it does give ‘jobs for the boys’ which I presume is its only purpose.
I love this planet. I drive an electric car and I certainly do my bit for ecology but the pendulum has swung wildly in the wrong direction and it needs bringing back to realism.