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In October 2005 Fingal County Council brought out sustainable building requirements of an unprecedented nature in Ireland, a landmark decision which should prove highly influential in progressing the shift to energy efficient, healthy, low environmental impact buildings in Ireland. The Local Area Plan for the Cappagh region of Fingal includes a range of sustainable building requirements, with perhaps the most notable being that the annual space and water heating energy requirements for all buildings must now not exceed 50 kWh/m2, and that renewable energy must be used to meet at least 30% of these energy needs. In December the council consolidated their commitment to sustainable building, with councillors voting through the same requirements into Local Area Plans for North Ballymun and Northwest Balbriggan. In this forward thinking policy, which will positively impact on the design and construction of thousands of buildings in Fingal, local authorities across Ireland have a template to bring in similar requirements into both County Development Plans and Local Area Plans, with benefits almost too numerous to take in. But how did such a groundbreaking approach come to fruition?
The initial attempt to implement these laudable requirements can be traced back to February 2005, when Fingal’s Green Party Councillors for Howth, Balbriggan and Malahide—David Healy, Joe Corr and Robbie Kelly respectively—submitted sustainable building requirement proposals they had been developing for the County Development Plan.
“We wanted to get a standard into the County Development Plan that all developments would have to meet”, explains David Healy. “We drafted it up with the double requirement of a heating demand and a percentage of renewable energy”.
However, although the proposals were given detailed consideration at the time, there was some scepticism in the council about setting sustainable building requirements of this kind and on this scale. “At that stage the planners argued that this wasn't something that should go into the County Development Plan; that it was a matter for the Building Regulations. From looking at the 2000 Planning and Development Act it’s clear that we can include these kinds of standards in the Development Plan, but the majority of the councillors decided not to. It was quite a close decision,” Healy reveals.
A key concern which the council were understandably affected by was how the market would respond to bringing in requirements of this kind. Crucially, in the aftermath of the vote on the County Development Plan, Healy, Corr and Kelly did not lose faith in their approach, and an opportunity arose in discussions with Menolly Homes, who were looking to develop land in Barnhill, Dublin 15.
“We got a number of commitments from the land owner. One was in relation to public transport access to the site, and the other in relation to the energy standards that we were looking for”, states Healy. “On that basis it was made a public commitment and we wrote it in at zoning. I think that probably changed the views of some of the councillors, in that a developer had shown that these were reachable standards and could be achieved”.
Armed with proof that developers were prepared to meet sustainable building requirements above and beyond Building Regulations requirements, the councillors submitted the following proposals into the Local Area Plan for Cappagh, which were successfully voted through in October 2005:
“The residential development will attain high standards of energy
efficiency and environmental sustainability, including the following:
- bio-climatic site design,
- water conservation,
- ventilation,
- energy efficient strategies for housing design,
- daylight analysis,
- high insulation standards
“All new buildings will meet the minimum low energy performance standards
(as defined below) as a prerequisite to receiving planning approval
(calculation report to be submitted with the planning application). Each
building's energy performance calculation must be demonstrated on the basis
of a simple approved method (e.g. EN 832) carried out by qualified or
accredited experts. Low energy buildings are defined as building with an
annual heating requirement (space and water heating) not exceeding 50
kWh/m2 of useful floor area.
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