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different behaviour perception, so that needs education.
The last, to close it, is to really look at how we can address the carbon issue, how
much energy supply to your building is going to come from a non-fossil fuel base,
whether we can generate some power by renewable means? No doubt, I think
the payback will be extremely long, but it is a kind of commitment your company
could consider seriously -- how much you want to do in that respect by
considering the still quite expensive renewable technology.
In regard to the Development Bureau's attention or the Environmental Bureau's
attention to carbon, I am very adamant that for climate issues coordination of
independent bureau efforts must come from a ministerial level. We can see it
would be much more effective if in the upcoming elections we have got a new
administration that put a lot of attention into this particular area, co-ordinating all
the good efforts by the bureaux, but in a more effective way.
Dr Guiyi Li: I would like to take on two points. Number one, at the very
beginning of the zero carbon building project inception stage, we were thinking
about how we can achieve zero carbon emissions and one joke was that you build
it and then don't use it and then it is zero carbon emissions. If you also look at
the extreme condition, you can design a building very well, very energy efficient,
but if you don't use it properly you still don't achieve your objectives. That leads
to the issue of people's behavioural change.
In fact, I saw data somewhere that saifd the contribution to energy savings –
about 70 percent, actually – is coming from human behavioural change and 30
percent is coming from others. So I just want to emphasize human behavioural
changes, and to do that is a long process. During lunch-time we discussed that
even 10 years ago not many people had heard of green buildings. Now everyone
knows what a green building is. Also, we talked about shark's fin soup. If it was
10 years ago, not to drink shark's fin soup, people would say, “Unimaginable!”
Now, actually it is quite common not to have shark's fin soup in a banquet. So
talking about the education process, there was a behavioural change. That is
number one.
Number two I think is the policy side. For instance, in this zero carbon building
we have surplus energy generated from a renewable source and then that goes
back to the electricity grid. At the moment, it is free of charge. That is not a very
good story to tell, and obviously I understand there is an issue. The reason we
export it for free because the electricity utility companies have to invest in the
infrastructure to take in this non-stable and fluctuating electricity from the
building. Today it is not a profitable business. I think the government needs to
have a certain policy to go with these sort of measures, so that people feel that by
saving energy or by exporting renewable energy to the electricity grid they
actually benefit themselves as well as benefit the community.
Mr David Littler: I just want to say something about the ROI. For a specific
measure like a solar thermal panel, the ones that generate hot water, six or seven
years is a typical figure for payback. But for a large, speculative office building,
there is quite a lot of data around which talks about increased rents, increased
percentage of lettable area, if a large international tenant is looking for a green
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