15 days. That’s all it took to build this 30-story, pre-fabricated hotel in the Southeastern Chinese city of Changsha. The speed of construction has left many astonished.
Built among dirt roads and dilapidated buildings, the hotel is a symbol of the development boom that has shifted 400 million Chinese into the urban environment — causing emissions to skyrocket in the process.
Typically, a prefabricated building will reduce construction time by about one-third to one-half. Construction time for this hotel was cut by up to two-thirds.
Johathan Kaiman of the LA Times wrote a fascinating piece last week on how the building came together and what it says about China’s construction industry:
“This is the tallest building in this county, and it’s also the fastest-built,” said Rong Shengli, one of the building’s planners, looking over the rural sprawl from a helicopter pad on the hotel’s roof. “Next we’re going to build a 50-story building. Then a 100-story one, then a 150-story one. And they’re all going to go up fast.”
Zhou Weidong, a vice president at Broad Sustainable Building, said the company was developing as quickly as its home country. Looking out the window of a company Buick, he noted that the squat concrete homes, convenience stores and auto repair shops lining the newly paved road between the headquarters of Broad Sustainable Building and central Changsha were at most a year old.
“Three years later, if you come back here, this will be a city,” he said. “That’s China. It changes overnight.”
Indeed, it is mostly construction activity — not just electricity — that is causing China’s greenhouse gas emissions to skyrocket. Last September, researchers writing in the Environmental Science and Technology Journal calculated that cement, iron and steel accounted for 46% of China’s carbon emissions growth, while electricity generation accounted for about 30% of growth.
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Interesting video. We struggle with prefabrication here, since it always is more expensive, even when factoring in the time involved.
I believe you made an error here, Stephen. The 46% of China’s emissions from iron, steel, and cement cannot be correct. If you read the article, they are referring to emissions growth, not CO2 sent into the atmosphere.
EIA puts CO2 emissions from the world steel industry at 3.2% of the global total (dwarfed by deforestation’s 18%). Cement production is historically in the 5-6% range.
China is on a construction binge, but their emissions still come mostly from coal plant driven electricity consumption.
Interesting and makes a good point about speed of “development” but two minor (or not so minor) points about the graphics at 2:21 minutes in:
1) While particulates in the air are shown being lower for “indoors” than “outdoors” , CO2 is higher. It goes from 440ppm outdoors to 720ppm indoors!
Or course maybe of equal concern is that CO2 “outdoors” is as high as 440ppm in the first place, tells you about the heavy use of fossil fuels (not sure how this compares to a ‘typical’ US city large or smaller, but 440ppm seems pretty high) And indoor at 720ppm? Yikes, at what level do you get (even smaller) human health effects from just co2 being so high..
2) The particulate numbers shows lower numbers “indoors” than “outdoors” which is good and as intended, but I don’t have a reference in front of me to know how “good” those lower numbers really are. I wouldn’t be surprised it it’s sensitive people, even the lower indoors level shown for particulates at 2:21, or even for “average” rather than”sensitive” people
I’ve seen this video several times online, as I’m sure have others here. One thing about it that really bothers me is the claim of building the hotel in 15 days. As best I can tell, that’s 15 days of on-site work and doesn’t account for all the time to create those pre-fab structures before the on-site work began. In other words, it appears to be one heck of a cherry pick.
I also have to wonder if this hotel will actually be used. Look around the net and you can find astonishing photos and articles about brand new ghost cities in China. Looks like they still haven’t learned the obvious lessons about being too reliant on (and proud of) their central planning skills.
Ugly as it is, that building is truly inspiring. We need this kind of approach–not for another ugly hotel–but for the rapid deployment of a renewable energy economy.
Super grids, large scale solar, electrified rail, grid scale storage, trash to energy, small scale biomass to fuels (with all due care)–we really really need to deploy this technology like they built that hotel.