| Summary: | Smart, low-carbon homes were once the preserve of one-off grand designs – now there are up to 30,000 projects in the pipeline Instead of parking spaces, it’s flowerbeds and vegetable planters that line the car-free street of Solar Avenue in Leeds, where rows of 60 low-energy homes form a little oasis along a bend in the River Aire, a short walk from the city centre. Built in a factory across the road, these terrace houses are made from super-airtight timber panels stuffed full of wood-fibre insulation, with triple-glazed windows and solar panels on the roof, each erected in less than a week. Using up to 10 times less energy than a conventional house, their heating demand is so low that they create excess electricity that is fed into a community grid and used to charge shared electric cars. There will soon be 1,000 such homes here, along with a combined primary school and care home, as well as a timber office building with yoga decks and a tennis court on the roof, together forming the pioneering Climate Innovation District. A few years ago these houses would have been experimental one-offs. But a green-design campaign group has calculated there are as many as 30,000 low-carbon homes in the pipeline, an impressive turnaround in which the industry is leading the way, ahead of government regulation. “The way we build housing in the UK hasn’t changed much since the Victorian era,” says Chris Thompson, the founder of Citu, the developer behind the Leeds project, which plans to build 500 low-energy homes a year. “It’s all driven by perceived risk. Anyone looking to build something has to answer to a funder, who’ll use valuers to ensure that what you’re proposing has a market.” Shifting the mindset of such a risk-averse industry can seem like an insurmountable challenge, not helped by the government dragging its heels on policy changes. But now, after scrapping Labour’s zero-carbon homes target in 2015, the Conservative government has... |