[photopress:property_NY_energy_efficient_1.jpg,full,alignright]China’s developers are still building ‘energy-guzzling’ buildings, flying in the face of sustainability pledges made during their design.
China, facing an uphill battle to secure energy and resources to feed its booming economy, has set targets to make new buildings 50% more energy efficient by 2010.
But the China Daily reports that only 53% of China’s new buildings had met national energy conversation standards citing a construction ministry survey which, totally corectly, blamed cost-cutting developers.
Song Chunhua, president of the China Real Estate Association, said, ‘The findings are alarming. More comprehensive measures are needed to achieve the national goal.’
Song said developers had ‘changed their minds’ on implementing energy-saving standards and were ‘still building new energy guzzlers.’
This is always, not only in China, an absolute given.
If you want energy-saving buildings you need strong government action. It has happened elsewhere. The booming construction industry is a huge drain on global energy stocks.
Construction and building materials consume 16-18% of China’s energy use, analysts have estimated, and around half of the world’s new buildings go up in China each year. (Our illustration is of a properly designed and properly constructed energy-saving building. It is in New York.)
The problem is that developers can turn a fast dollar by ignoring energy-saving buildings. The way, the only way, is immensely tough government action at every level. Unless that happens rowing affluence poses a threat to efficiency goals as the country’s rapidly expanding middle class clamors for larger, more energy-intensive housing. And, in the end, most of them will have to come down.
Source: Reuters
You must log in to post a comment.