New website promotes sustainable homes

Smarterhomes is one of the flagship initiatives to be promoted through the household sustainability programme.

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I am very pleased to welcome you here to Environment House (a very energy efficient building), to celebrate the launch of the highly practical Smarter Homes website tool. Thank you all for making the effort to organise your schedules to be here. I'd like to particularly thank Nick Collins from Beacon Pathway for flying from Taupo this afternoon to be part of this celebration and also give a warm welcome to the Sue Chetwin, the recently appointed CEO for the Consumers Institute.

My colleague David Benson-Popes gives his apologies for not being here today. He is a keen driver of the government's overall leadership programme to deliver better sustainable development across New Zealand.

Firstly, a brief history of the development of this website:

Smarter Homes was commissioned by the Ministry for the Environment nearly two years ago and is a collaborative project between key agencies from the public and private sector. It was developed by Beacon Pathway and overseen by a Board drawn from Ministry for the Environment, Department of Building and Housing, the Consumers' Institute and Building Research. At its heart is the desire to help kiwis benefit from making healthier and smarter decisions for their home environment.

The involvement of the Consumers' Institute is a guarantee of the site's credibility and consumer advocacy; it does not promote particular companies and their products or systems.

Smarter Homes also has close links to LEVEL, a website for building professionals developed by Building Research being launched next week. LEVEL will be a younger brother to the smarter homes website, and the Consumer Build website is the older brother to both.

My involvement as Minister for Energy and Climate Change is primarily because this initiative will deliver both energy and climate change benefits.

It is a top priority now for us all to make connections between our use of fossil fuels and the subsequent emission of greenhouse gases that cause climate change. If we can start making a difference as individuals in our own homes by being smart about how we use energy, then we will really make dents into the challenge of addressing climate change.

A recent International Panel on Climate Change report says that making changes to domestic energy use when building, along with changing our living habits in homes, is a significant way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Improving our energy and water use efficiency and improving the design and layout of our homes, will automatically reduce our carbon emissions.

Smarterhomes is one of the flagship initiatives to be promoted through the household sustainability programme. Budget 2007 provides $72.4 million over the next four years to help Kiwi families live in warm, dry, healthy homes that are energy efficient and better for the environment.

We are now officially in the middle of winter and the southerlies are starting to pinch. This means people's power bills are starting to creep up as the electric blanket goes on and heaters are staying on for longer. Keeping warm is the difference between a miserable winter and a cosy one.

Tonight is the longest night of the year so it is a good time to put our thinking caps on about how to reduce our energy use and also reduce our personal power bills. We don't want our power bills and power use to spike too high.

But how do we do this? The sheer variety of available information in the marketplace means we often don't know where to start. Choosing the smartest products, systems, procedures and practices can be challenging. And of course, each home is as different as the needs, interests, values and priorities of the people who live in them.

The website www.smarterhomes.org.nz gives clear and independent advice on how to design, build and renovate homes that are "smarter" in every sense of the word.

A smart home creates less waste, uses less energy, costs less to run and is warmer, drier, and healthier to live in. There are numerous ways to address sustainability issues within the home.

For example, understanding the climate of your site and the orientation of a building on it is a good way to work out how to take advantage of the sun's energy. This then enables capture and storage of the heat from the sun.

And of course we can all take lots of smaller, day to day decisions that can together help deliver better, smarter and more cost efficient ways to use houses and their energy, water and waste systems.

A key feature of the web site is the HomeSmarts Calculator, which enables users to customise their searches and information needs according to their personal budget priorities, current renovation or building projects, and major problems they want to solve in their homes. The calculator also offers an opportunity to prioritise these issues and problems by running a simple home health-check.

I am delighted that this website project has brought organisations together from across industry and governmental. This is the type of collaboration that will indeed lead to New Zealand being the first carbon-neutral sustainable nation. This will have huge positive effects on our economy and of course fits with our sense of identity, which is so linked to the state of our environment.

This is what this website is all about and is the trend government is leading.

Soon, Clayton Cosgrove the Department of Building and Housing will take the reigns and with the help of the Ministry for the Environment, parent this website into its next phase.

Thank you.

ENDS

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