Is this slump all about peak oil?

We were hearing a lot about peak oil last summer when the oil price went to $147 a barrel. Since when, of course, the price has fallen through the floor, back down to 2005 levels, and, lo and behold, stories about peak oil have dropped off the radar.

But the issue refuses to go away and at least one serious commentator, Steven Koppits, suggests that we may have already passed the peak oil moment and that the global recession is the result.

Ultimately, the inability of the oil supply to keep pace with global demand proved to be a key contributing factor to the current recession. I would note, however, that the proximate cause of the recession is China, not peak oil. China ultimately provided both the financial liquidity and the commodities demand which brought down the global economy. Were China not so large and not at its current stage of development, peak oil could pass without anyone noticing for some time. As it was, China hit its stride just as the oil supply was stumbling. The issue was not, therefore, peak oil in and of itself, but rather the supply/demand imbalance caused by the inability of the global oil supply to adjust to China’s incremental demand.

It’s a very interesting, thought provoking piece and, to me, it makes a lot of sense.

"The Housing Downturn" - a review

Graham Norwood is a prolific and well known property journalist who has produced a book about the state of the housing market which he has subtitled “A Guide for Estate Agents and Developers.”

There are no earth shattering revelations here but it provides a useful summary of the events of the past three years. Graham doesn’t like to use the term “Crash” for what has happened to the housing market — he suggests his journalist colleagues have debased the term — but then he buys into the notion that things will recover soon. “Even now I believe that residential prices, like oil, will rise in value over the long term and within the next decade prices will surpass those seen at the recent peak in 2007.”

What gives him such confidence in this prediction? He trots out the hoary old chestnut that there is a shortage of homes in the UK and that in the long term this lack of supply will push prices up. But he conveniently ignores the fact that this was exactly the same reason used to justify ever-rising house prices rises in the years up to 2007. If this really was the case, then house prices would never have fallen back at all. What the “correction” has shown us is that the predictions for both population growth and household formation were as much products of the long speculative housing boom as causes of it. And both these supposed “drivers” of house price rises may be just as likely to stabilise or even head south, as has happened in Germany for many years. There is no hard and fast rule that says they will continue to climb upwards for ever and a day.

And if they don’t, then there is no particular reason for house prices to bounce back to where they were in 2007, anymore than there is for the FTSE 100 to regain its previous peaks, or the oil price to go back through $147 a barrel, or wherever it got to back in the crazy summer of 2008.

The book has a good section on estate agents, a subject I don’t know much about. Apparently, Rightmove is toast. Globerix is the future, because it doesn’t charge a fat fee to the agents listing. Or maybe not. It’s not quite that simple.

And the best section of all is where Graham intrepidly goes where few reporters ever dared, to an Inside Track investor’s presentation. One of the very definite plus points of the property “correction” is that steam-ups like this can no longer happen.

On the other hand, this book itself is a very slim volume. I read it cover to cover in three sittings, totalling maybe three hours. At around £25 to buy, it’s more than a bit pricey. Nevertheless, it’s a very easy and approachable read and I feel sure it will become a valuable reference point in years to come when people try to remember what these times we are living through were like.

Arbury Park revisited

This is a forlorn spot on the northern edge of Cambridge. I revisited yesterday. It's new, its meant to be an exciting place to live and already it looks like a slum. Desperately sad.

On Cavity Wall Insulation

The house I am currently living in was built in 1960. I have long been pondering what exactly to do with it: the choices being the demolish it and rebuild a new, or to renovate it.

It’s got lots of glass. A very sixties house. Even though it’s double glazed to a reasonable standard (mostly aluminium frames), it gets cold and the heating system is barely up to the task of keeping it warm in winter. It will readily burn 20 litres of oil a day in winter on space heating and that translates to something like 150kWh/m2/annum under normal occupancy conditions. Or ten times the PassivHaus standard of 15kWh/m2/annum, now the target of choice for low energy designs.

It has cavity walls — that’s easy to tell because all the bricks are stretchers — but whether the cavity itself has insulation in it I have no idea. So, when researching an article last month about grants for cavity wall insulation, I contacted two agencies who undertook grant work and both said they would send a surveyor out within six weeks. Last night at 8pm, a guy rings and asks if he can come by at 8 am this morning. He actually arrives at 7.22. He’s gone by 7.27, having drilled one hole through the brickwork, found evidence of some polystyrene beading and then announced that “I’d no need to worry because I’d been done already.”

I am left wondering. What was all that about?

I await the visit of surveyor No 2. And more thoughts about the Cavity Wall Insulation Business.

The scheme contact details are as follows. One is run by the Energy Savings Trust, called the Affordable Energy Scheme (Tel: 0800 512012); the other is called the Heat Project (Tel: 0800 093 4050), which is funded by the energy suppliers. They offer pretty much the same thing, which is subsidised cavity wall and/or loft insulation. Anyone can apply for this grant-aided work, which has to be carried out by approved installers, and the rate paid is fixed at £189 which gets you 130m2 of cavity wall insulation or 55m2 of loft insulation – or twice £189 (=£378) if you want both. If your project exceeds these amounts, you are charged pro rata at £4.50/m2. If your project is smaller, then the rate is lower.

PassivHaus ventilation questions

Picked up this interesting paper off a thread on the Green Building Forum. It hails from Canada and dates from 1969, but it has an air of authenticity about it. It answers a question I have long wondered about – just how much fresh air do we need to survive and prosper?

Every time we breathe in, we draw in just under 1 litre of air. If it’s fresh air, we draw it in at atmospheric conditions, which equate to 21% oxygen and 0.03% CO2 (or 300ppm – since 1969 this has increased to 380ppm, but that’s another story and it doesn’t effect the calculations here). Our lungs absorb oxygen and give back CO2, so that what we breathe out consists of 16% oxygen and 4% CO2. In the course of an hour, while at rest, we breathe in and out around 500 litres or 0.5m3.

If you are asleep in an enclosed space of, say, 16m3 (typical size for a small bedroom), then, over 8 hours, you will have added 4m3 of exhaled air so that, when you get up in the morning, around 25% of the air volume in the room will have passed through your lungs. That means that CO2 levels should have reached (4 x 0.25) 0.5%, which equates to 5,000ppm.

My little experiment last week, sleeping in a bedroom of around 30m3 on which I shut the door and closed the windows, got the CO2 detector to register just over 2,000ppm, which falls fairly accurately within these parameters. So far so good. The paper suggests that 4,000ppm CO2 is unpleasant and represents really poor IAQ. I would concur. I thought 2,000ppm was stale and stuffy.

Now what is interesting to me about this paper is that it concludes that a safe level of ventilation is around ten times what we breathe in and out. At rest, we breathe around 8lts per minute: the recommended ventilation rate is 80lts per minute. That’s enough to ensure that indoor CO2 should never get above 500ppm, which is unnoticeable. That’s an incredible safety margin. In fact, you can control indoor CO2 levels with much lower rates of ventilation, as people rarely if ever stay in one room for more than 8 hours at a time. So bear in mind that the minimum accepted ventilation levels have a huge margin of safety built into them.

How do these figures compare with an average leaky house, which experiences around a complete air change every four hours. Say the house is 300m3. That means that 75m3 of air is changing every hour. Which works out at 1.25m3 or 1250lts per minute. Enough to keep 15 people breathing easily, at the recommended ventilation levels. And that’s with the windows closed.

What about an air tight, PassivHaus style structure? Assume something like 0.6 ach at 50 Pascals – that in fact is the PassivHaus standard for air tightness. It is estimated that at normal atmospheric pressure, the actual air changes are 20 times less than they are at 50 Pascals, so we could assume a real air change of 0.6/20 = 0.03 ach. Again, lets assume a 300m3 house. 300x0.03 equates to 9m3 per hour or 150 lts per minute. That’s the air leakiness that you get with a 300m3 PassivHaus. It is still surprisingly high. In fact, it’s still fine for two people (at the very safe 80 lts per minute each). So rumours that you would suffocate if you lived in a PassivHaus with no ventilation are perhaps just a little exaggerated. In fact, you would survive just fine.

These calcs do call into question the insistence (from PassivHaus practitioners) that you have to have MVHR installed in an airtight house if indoor air quality isn’t to suffer. The problem with air quality is actually more localised. You can induce it over a prolonged period (like 8 hours sleep) in an enclosed space (like a bedroom), but you would struggle to notice it in a whole house. MVHR is very much a whole house solution to a problem that affects individual rooms. Why ventilate the living spaces at night? Why ventilate the bedrooms during the day?

All good questions. The debate will run and run.

Lumens per watt: a useful graph

Was looking into the background of lighting efficiency when I came across this chart on the web. Useful. BTW, Part L defines energy efficient lighting as anything that equals or betters 40 lumens per watt. Click on the chart to make it open up larger in another window.