The man who helped spawn the UK's energy policy for buildings is crossing a new frontier

ADRIAN HEWITT – the man responsible for making the Merton Rule a mainstream mantra in planning policy – is peering through the window of Merton’s Civic Centre in London.

He is pointing at the solar panels and vertical wind turbines on the Big Yellow Self-Storage building on Morden Road.

“This stuff is going up all over the place,” he says. “And I know perfectly well, that if it hadn’t been for the Merton Rule it just wouldn’t be there”

In 2003, the London borough of Merton amended its planning framework to stipulate that any new development must generate at least 10% its energy from onsite renewables.

Today, 325 of the 390 councils in England have taken up the original Merton Rule.

This month, a backbench Bill to enshrine its presence in primary legislation gained an unopposed second reading – leading to reports that the Bill could be signed off as early as September.

“It lays to rest any legal uncertainty for councils wanting to adopt Merton-type policies,” says Hewitt.

Ultimately meaning that developers smarting over the cost and time of installing renewables on new developments can never successfully appeal against it.

Merton Rule
Today, Hewitt has left his post as principal environment officer for the London Borough of Merton to head up Metropolis Green, a consultancy that designs renewable energy strategies for local authorities, developers and councils.

When we speak, he is in between giving conferences on a new Merton initiative aiming to plug yet another gaping hole in the government’s green agenda – monitoring a building’s energy usage.

And with the government announcing its renewable energy strategy in June with the aim of hitting the EU’s target of generating 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, the need for the concept is immediate. “The amount of evaluative data we have on how buildings perform is so minimal it is scary,” he confides.

Hewitt is no stranger to educating government.

After all, it was he who ruthlessly sped around the country, giving seminars and building up a lobbying network to push the Merton Rule into mainstream planning. “The idea was dreamed up by two other guys before me,” he says, “but it was left dusty in the cupboard. I got involved in 2001 when it became apparent that the government was basically saying no way to the idea.”

What Hewitt grasped early on was the simplicity of the concept. “It was a really clever little idea whose time had come,” he says. “I remember thinking, here was something that could ease the strain and frustrations of local authorities who were sick to death of trying to encourage developers to design energy efficient buildings.”

Chris Twinn, director of sustainable buildings at Arup, says the influence of the Merton Rule cannot be understated. “There had been people working on it the odd decade before it came in, but the issue was trying to move it into the mainstream,” he says. “Then the Greater London Authority started asking for it, and then upped its requirement, now central government is saying all homes are to are to be zero carbon. All of this was adding momentum to which the Merton Rule was a key component.”

The Merton Rule was also a catch phrase politicians could latch onto without being drowned in technical jargon. “It was a concept politicians found difficult to disagree with because there are elements of motherhood and apple pie about it,” says Twinn. “You need it paraphrased to that kind of level for it to take off.”

However, the Rule hasn’t completely breezed past everyone’s eyes uncritically, with some green lobbying bodies saying that it puts too much emphasis on just one area of sustainable building.

Inbuilt Consulting chief executive Dr David Strong says that simply bolting on some renewables does not make a green building. “The thing that concerns me mainly about it,” he says, “is that there are people out there who apply for planning, satisfy the Merton Rule requirements and they think that’s it – job done. Whereas, there is much more to it than that.”

Monitoring energy
Although extremely gratified to see nearly all of the councils in England adopt the original rule, Hewitt is now concerning himself with the wider problem of monitoring both a building’s energy usage, and the amount of energy it’s producing.

“What is the point in having national targets if they can’t effectively be tracked?” he says. Hewitt is working with students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts to establish a way of gathering a building’s energy data.

Under proposals, a local authority would insert a clause into its Enforcement Conditions requiring a developer to install a monitoring device so the council can monitor both the energy use of the building and the energy efficiency of the renewable energy devices.

Hewitt says the Communities and Local Government (CLG), of which he is a member of its scientific advisory group, and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have both sat in on presentations, with the Government Office for London “liking” and being “intrigued” by the idea.

Just like the Merton Rule, the issue of monitoring the energy of a building has so far been neglected by the government’s energy policy.

The only item in place that remotely deals with monitoring a building’s energy is the Code for Sustainable Homes (CSH) post-construction review where an assessor goes back after the construction phase to check if everything meets the standard.

It is not however designed for collating live data for energy. Miranda Pennington, sustainability consultant for Metropolis Green is also a CSH assessor. She says councils have always struggled with the enforcement of the renewable energy criteria and with government stretching renewable energy targets further, monitoring is going to become more and more of a problem.

“Local authorities don’t really have the time or the scope to go to every scheme to check if the developer has installed 30m2 of photovoltaic panels and not 25m2,” she says. “Likewise they might have put in 30m2 but perhaps the manufacturer over-specified how much electricity the panels generate. This is where the energy monitoring system will solve the problem.”

There has been a shift in the government policy towards post-occupancy evaluations for buildings.

The government’s Energy Performance Certificates (EPC) deal with a building’s theoretical energy performance and are valid for ten years, while Display Energy Certificates (DEC) for public sector buildings are based on actual energy performance and are valid for 12 months. If the government has the nerve to extend DECs into commercial buildings it will help raise interest in the whole issue of postoccupancy evaluation.

Hewitt says that with the introduction of a monitoring concept, it will throw up “a lot of shocks” for building owners. “You’re going to find that new builds proudly stamped with an EPC might not be achieving that rating a year later.”

Onsite/offsite
Hewitt is concerned the UK-GBC’s definition of zero carbon homes, which includes community scale and offsite renewables, is sending developers a get-out-of-jail free card.

The UK-GBC concluded that the government’s current definition, which excludes the use of offsite renewables, was not achievable on up to 80% of new homes by 2020.

“The Town and Country Planning Association Policy Council is extremely weary of the idea of being able to buy in energy from outside,” says Hewitt. “It sets a precedence that the developer thinks that it is a get-out-of jail-free card.”

While the Merton Rule might soon reach its ceiling – unable to be extrapolated much further than 20% onsite with the current technologies on the market, Hewitt says the key to its future is just around the corner.

“We’re on the threshold of a new generation of pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion technology – which will process household and industrial waste into biogas,” he says. “I think you can raise the level of renewables required when these technologies come on stream.”

Will we be laughing in five years time at the buildings we have achieved today, I ask, expecting a myriad of ideas that will blow my mind. “It is more subtle than that,” he says,

rather anti-climactically. “I don’t think from the outside they’ll look much different. You’ll find photovoltaic arrays used on the facades of buildings and on the roofs as the cost of electricity and gas escalates. But it will all quietly become the norm.”

When Hewitt talks about the next phase of energy generation, he tends to ramp his voice up to a roar, invigorated by filling yet more of the government’s gaps, perhaps. It is apparent he is no longer satisfied with the tag of ‘Mr Merton Rule’ – and ready to challenge developers again. “This new system is going to monitor every new building and every bit of renewable energy kit that’s ever installed,” he says. It’s going to give us the analysis about how we build the zero carbon buildings of the future.”