10 April 2010 Too cool for school: Britain's most eco-friendly building
The loos flush using rainwater, roofs are covered with sedum plants, the building is heated using the playground and the desks are made from drainpipes. In the Welcome to Howe Dell primary school, Hatfield, the most eco-friendly building in the country. Commissioned by Hertfordshire County Council, one of Britain's more environmentally conscientious local authorities, Howe Dell is almost an experiment in how green and sustainable a building can be. The pièce de résistance of the building was the construction of the world's first IHT system underneath the playground. IHT, which stands for Interseasonal Heat Transfer, takes heat from the sunshine that falls on the tarmac playground, then stores it and releases it in the winter to heat the school. IHT was invented and then developed by the London-based company Icax (Interseasonal Collection and Exchange). Until now, if you wanted to use the heat generated by summer sunshine to warm something at a different time of year, you could not do so without converting it, inefficiently, into another form of energy, such as electricity. There hasn't been an effective way of storing the energy directly in the form of heat and releasing it later, when it is needed. For the full news article and to be taken to the website, click here | 
