HERON TOWER - NON-SUSTAINABILITY

While acknowledging this building is trying harder than many London office buildings to be sustainable with an “Excellent BREEAM” rating, part shading from solar gain, and a small % of electricity provided by PV. This building is a disastrous and short sighted step backwards in UK species survival, in relation to Peak Oil, and Climate Change.

It is basically trying to continue with “business as usual”, with slight improvements in fossil fuel use and carbon emissions. It is carrying on with a huge additional energy use in the workplace, despite all the warnings from UN Scientists:- that we have to make urgent and thorough changes to cut our fossil fuel use, and cut our carbon emissions.
(see:- UN IPCC report agreed by several thousand scientists, from dozens of countries, 2007)

From the Heron developers specifications (approximate calculations):-
They have made provision for using a million kwhours per annum of electricity for small power and lighting, at 37 watts per square meter. This does not include the air conditioning and heating loads, say another 3million = 4 million kwhours of electricity for 300 sq meters of office.

The world has run out of cheap oil and gas, and electricity prices will now aonly spiral upwards quicker and quicker now, as demand escalates beyond posssible supply.

Despite our labour, and conservative/libdem admininistrations saying we are cutting our carbon emissions, this is totally untrue. Because their calculations do NOT include airplane and ship emissions, and exporting our production for our consumption, to Far East, and other cheap labour countries. Since the 2007 UN IPCC report, we have heavily increased our carbon emissions.

I conclude with a quote from US Dept of energy consultants report by R Hirsch 2005:-
PEAKING OF WORLD OIL ...IMPACTS, MITIGATION &RISK MANAGEMENT

This report has severe limitations, because it looks at how US industry and transport could carry on, business as usual, like the Heron Tower is today, without considering that this will destroy us with emissions causing catastrophic climate change. But sets the scene of what crises we are facing, and that we must act fast and thoroughly as the IPCC report recommended.

“There is no question that peaking is likely to occur in [2015-2020]. We”re in a very serious serious problem... Much worse than the worst that we could think of... the risks are beyond anything any of us have ever dealt with... The risks to our economies and civilisation is enormous ...This is really incredibly difficult, and incredibly severe problem.”