MAGAZINE 44 EXPERT OPINION

With China's economy booming, developers are willing to back futuristic eco-projects that strive to reduce their energy footprint. Alex Frew McMillan reports

China may not have the best record when it comes to the environment. And Beijing has already been smothered in a smog of bad press over pollution issues as it prepares for the Olympics later this year.

But China is, somewhat surprisingly, one of the frontrunners in the quest for sustainable real-estate development. Certain projects are even being built with an eye to a building generating its own energy instead of just absorbing it.

At the recent MIPIM Asia conference, held at the end of November in the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, eco-issues were very much at the forefront. Delegates from some of the biggest developers around Asia were pondering the issue of sustainable property development.

Stanley Yip, the Hong Kong-based director of planning and development at engineering company Arup, countered the popular notion that sustainable projects always have to be more expensive to build.

"I don't think it is always more expensive," Yip said. "It depends on how you measure it. And then you go to the government looking for policy support. You need to measure the financial benefits and measure the benefits to the homeowner."

A project that Arup has been working on, Dongtan Eco-City in Shanghai, won the prize for the best "futura project" at the MIPIM event.

Dongtan Eco-City aims to create a whole city that will be as energy efficient as possible. The Shanghai Industrial Investment Co. is the developer, and Arup, which says the project will be the world's first city built specifically around sustainability, came up with the master design. The project will eventually cover 84 square kilometres. But the first phase will be a more manageable 6.3 square kilometres, designed to house a population of 80,000.

Yip said one of the main problems in targeting green designs is quantifying how green they are. In an era when any savvy marketing team will try to tag any development as eco-friendly, it is vital to be able to measure whether that is really true, he explained.

Arup looked to deliver a project that is quantifiably more energy efficient. Based on comparisons with existing city construction standards and planning, it calculates that the Dongtan Eco-City design reduces energy use by 64 percent, resulting in a reduction of 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

It also looks at social, economic and environmental considerations. For instance, the plan maximises open space per capita and also strives to allow people to live as close to work as possible.

"These factors are driving the design, not the other way around," Yip said. "It is very difficult to compare two plans and say, ‘Which one is more sustainable?' The design process has to change. It is not just a creative process. It is also a technical one, and it must be measurable."

Arup has a second project in Beijing where the goal was to reduce energy consumption over a 400-hectare residential area by 20 percent. "The government is setting very specific performance standards and growing the amount of policies on that front, so the design needs very strong technical backup to measure energy reduction, renewable energy and so on," Yip said.

The London Borough of Merton was the first municipality to set specific standards for renewable energy, Yip said. It created the "Merton rule," that any commercial development would be required to have at least 10 percent on-site renewable energy

Now the United Kingdom government has a plan to require all new houses to be carbon-neutral by 2016. China is also starting to look at such requirements — its current five-year plan looks to reduce emissions by 10 percent, for instance.

That kind of planning requires a new financing model for projects. The government, the developer, the builder and the end user must all buy into the concept of sustainable development.

"It is no longer just the developer or builder who shoulders the cost," Yip said. "You need to get the government and the end user to help finance the development."

But the commitment seems to be there in China, where the government is keen to support renewable energy. For instance, Yip said the total surface area of all the solar panels in China amounts to 76 percent of the world's total and is growing at 20 percent to 30 percent per year.

Francis Cooke, the design director of the Shanghai office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, said he has been very impressed by the open attitude to environmentally friendly construction projects that he has seen in China. He moved to Shanghai last year from Chicago.

"The commitment to renewable energy is definitely much greater in China than it is in the United States," he said.

His company has been designing the Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, which is incorporating many groundbreaking approaches to energy efficiency. The building should be the first zero-energy skyscraper in China when complete.

Cooke credits the developer with backing such a futuristic design. The government in Guangzhou also showed a commitment to the project.

"You've got to give credit to the client, who said let's go for it," Cooke said. "There is an upfront cost. We went back to the government and said, ‘We've got a very forward-looking design,' and the government poneyed up money for it."

Construction started in 2006 and the building should be completed in 2009. It will have 71 floors and 2.3 million square feet of office space. Much of the space will be taken up by the Guangdong arm of the China National Tobacco Corp., which will move its headquarters there.

To make the building as energy efficient as possible, it has been necessary to reconsider almost every aspect of the building's construction and structure.

"There is no one magic bullet," Cooke said. "There is no one strategy that will take care of everything."

The designers say the building can reduce its overall energy use over a conventional building by around 58 percent.

The outside of the building features photovoltaic cells that absorb solar energy. That is then used to heat the building's hot water supply and to create electricity.

The photovoltaic cells are particularly useful on the sides of the building that face south and north, since these get the most sun. Since the sun also heats the building, the design includes a double wall designed to trap the heat, feeding the heat up the building into a turbine. It also channels cool air down into the building, cutting down on air conditioning.

"I was shocked that even in winter, these buildings need cooling," Cooke said. The floor-fed ventilation system aims to suck up the heat generated by the people working in the building, while the ceiling has a radiant cooling system with chilled water flowing through beams.

Cooke agreed that green technology does not necessarily have to be more expensive. For instance, the heating, ventilation and cooling system designed for the Pearl River Tower is narrower and more efficient than a conventional HVAC system. That allows the building to incorporate an extra five floors, resulting in 100,000 square feet of extra space that would otherwise have been wasted.

Perhaps the most innovative feature of the design incorporates wind power. The force of the wind is a particular problem for tall buildings, with wind sheer making the building sway and shake.

The Pearl River Tower has pairs of large apertures on each of its mechanical floors, allowing air to flow through the building. This reduces the building's shaking, and wind turbines turn the wind whistling through the building into electricity.

Cooke said forward-thinking building design also tries to use natural gas and methane as a power source where possible, since they are renewable resources and more environmentally friendly than coal-powered electricity. Attempts are being made to harvest the natural gases produced by trash dumps, for instance.

Methane or natural gas can then be used to power micro-turbines, virtually mini-jet engines that can sit in the base of the building and be used to generate its electricity.

The designers of the Pearl River Tower hope that it will eventually even generate more power than it uses. Because smart buildings can generate some of their own power, Cooke said the United States is starting to employ a system of "net metering," where buildings pay for the electricity they use off the conventional grid system but can actually reduce their bill if they produce energy themselves.

"You pay for the energy off the meter, but if you are generating energy, you can run the meter backwards," Cooke said, adding that a net metering system was starting to be implemented in Guangzhou. "During the day an office building uses a lot of energy. But at night, it can feed energy back into the system."

Many of the attendants at the MIPIM conference felt the push to energy-efficient construction had been brought to the forefront by Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth. But they agreed the trend is here to stay.

Peter Young, the head of technical services and sustainability at Hongkong Land, said green issues are becoming more and more important for landlords and developers. Hongkong Land estimates that a good eco-profile can result in a 6 percent boost in occupancy and a 3 percent to 5 percent premium in rentals.

"It would be very imprudent if you are building a Grade-A office building not to incorporate green elements," Young said.

Cooke said Pearl River Tower should pay back the extra cost of its design in the form of energy savings within four to eight years. Yip said Dongtan Eco-City should have a payback period of eight years for energy savings and five years for water and waste management.

In the end, though, futurists are hoping energy efficiency will no longer be considered a groundbreaking feature in the real-estate industry. The technology will eventually graduate from the "world of tomorrow" to the present day.

"Eventually it is going to become standard, just like elevators are necessary for a 20-storey building," Cooke said. "It won't be viewed as a novelty and will eventually become normal practice."