What is a Zero Energy Mass Custom house?
Let’s suppose you want to buy a new house, and you are looking for one with a low carbon footprint, one where you do not have to pay electricity bills or one capable of producing ‘clean’ energy through renewables; all of which should be immediately available and adequate to your budget. Sorry to disappoint you, but those options are scarce in the housing market. Only if you have undetermined time and money, you could opt for a bespoke design that fulfils your specific desires.
However, there could be an alternative. Imagine that you could select and personalise your new house from interactive catalogues that provide you immediate pricing and detailed information about your choices. You could be able to select a house as green as you want it, knowing its exact energy performance and environmental benefits in advance.
A Zero Energy Mass Custom house, or short as ZEMCH, are those houses that reach an operational annual electric (gas) energy threshold by producing at least as much energy as they consume and ensure its energy qualities through marketing and supply chains that utilise mass customisation systems.
The interesting aspect of this new term is the marriage of two apparently unrelated concepts– zero-energy and mass-customisation– which could have positive outcomes in terms of environment and housing quality.
Zero-energy should not be taken literary as the absence of energy neither as a limitation of it. Zero-energy refers to the “equilibrium” of energies flowing in or out a house. For practical reasons, energy is conceived as the electric (gas) energy, which is consumed by appliances (heaters, air conditioning, lighting, etc) and generated through renewables (solar panels, heat pump, wind turbine, etc). The energy generated is considered positive and the one consumed negative; therefore, a zero-energy house is that one that generates more energy than it consumes over a fixed period of time (usually a year).
It is important to understand that the ‘zero’ does not mean a mandatory equilibrium of negative and positive energies, as in reality, this is really rare to happen. It is more useful if considered as a threshold or goal.
The conception of zero-energy houses relies on the intelligent application of passive design strategies in combination with engineering technologies; while, mass-customisation is a sophistication of marketing production systems– mass production and crafting production.
Mass-customisation emerged as a business strategy to provide companies with a commercial advantage, allowing them to cover a bigger market range by producing customisable products without sacrificing quality and production costs.
Concretely, Mass Customisation refers to the management of marketing, design and manufacturing systems capable of producing a controlled variety of products preselected by individuals.
Customers are bridged with the production decision-making process, which they can manipulate in order to produce whatever they want to purchase. Customers visualise the company’s product portfolio through interactive navigation tools (displays, software, interactive catalogues) where they select and customise their product up to the limits established by the provider. Diverse markets already utilise mass-customisation processes, like the shoe, automobile and furniture industry.
In theory, mass-customisation is simply a paradigm shift, but actually, it is a complicated process of logistic and management. Everything relies on the successful control of parallel process– the customer’s design decision-making and production. From the company’s perspective, the key is to pre-establish an efficient set of parameters that allow the customer a certain design freedom, what is known as a solution space.
An effective solution space needs of 3 things: (1) a customer friendly navigation tool where choices are displayed and selected, (2) being capable to translate design decisions into manufacturing language, and (3) production/assembly processes flexible enough to produce a diverse range of products.
In Japan, ZEMCH models are daily produced and sold. Around 15% (400,000 houses annually) of the houses erected in this country are conceived through mass-customisation processes which have high levels of energy efficiency. To-day, around 75% of these houses are equipped with photovoltaic panels (PV) and year to year companies implement new energy solutions to their models, not because they are obliged to, but because they find it as a commercial advantage.
It is a reality that the Japanese context is extremely peculiar and one could think that things like the ZEMCH practice could only exist there. But, mass-customisation is not so dependant on robotics and technology, it is more reliant to the position of the customer in the supply chain, production and construction processes might not have to be altered to implement it. Some countries, like Germany, UK, Austria or the USA have sophisticated technologies involved in construction but remain procuring houses in a traditional way.
ZEMCH is a proposed alternative to facilitate the conception and acquisition of sustainable houses that could be implemented where other noxious processes predominate.
* Acknowledgements to Dr Masa Noguchi for his guidance on this fascinating topic.
