This article was written by Leon Smith, Founding Director, Formative Architects
I recently attended NI Chamber’s Energy Forum, where Professor David Rooney and a panel of influential speakers presented a detailed picture of Northern Ireland’s energy landscape.
What followed was a wide-ranging panel discussion covering energy procurement, power purchase agreements, microgeneration, solar panels and future market strategies. It was genuinely informative, but it left me asking a fundamental question: How little energy do our buildings need in the first place?
Fossil fuel reliance
Northern Ireland remains heavily dependent on imported fossil fuels, and for much of rural Northern Ireland, heating oil is still the primary source of energy.
Prices have already spiked significantly in recent years, and with ongoing instability in the Strait of Hormuz and escalating tensions in the Middle East, further volatility is a reality. Every price shock acts as an uncontrollable tax on households and businesses alike, with no local mechanism to absorb or offset it.
Flawed buildings
The conventional response has been to look at how energy is generated or procured: renewables, heat pumps, battery storage. These technologies undoubtedly have a role to play. But they all begin with the assumption that the building itself is flawed in terms of design and energy use and requires a significant amount of energy to operate. With our understanding of Passive House, we start somewhere different: how little energy can we use to heat or cool this building?
Passive House
Despite the name, Passive House is a design methodology for all buildings, not just houses.
The underlying principles, such as high levels of insulation, exceptional airtightness, elimination of thermal bridging, high-performance windows and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery, can reduce a building’s heating and cooling energy demand by up to 90%. And critically, you don’t need full PH or EnerPHit certification to realise substantial benefits.
Applying these calculated principles thoughtfully to new builds and retrofits alike delivers real, measurable reductions in operating cost. The cheapest unit of energy, after all, is the one you never have to buy.
Energy cost strategy
This matters for businesses as much as homeowners. Most organisations will have a five-to-ten-year plan. But how many have seriously considered what their buildings will cost to operate over thirty or fifty years?
Energy costs are rarely factored into long-term strategy in the way that staffing or capital investment are, yet for organisations that own their premises, building fabric represents one of the most significant and controllable long-term cost variables they have, not one that should be left to the cheapest possible procurement method.
Wider responsibility
It also matters profoundly for social housing. There is a real and uncomfortable question worth asking: why are we continuing to build social housing to standards that risk placing the very people we are trying to help into fuel poverty?
Tenants in poorly performing homes bear the full burden of energy price volatility with the least capacity to absorb it. We have the knowledge and the tools to build differently.
We cannot control global energy markets. What we can control is how much energy our buildings require. In an increasingly volatile world, that may prove to be one of the wisest investments we can make.
