Construction Physics

As an avid reader, I anticipate the feedback as "unlikely to scale, since the centralized productivity gains don't outweigh the diminished flexibility and substantial transport costs".

This is a recurring theme with prefab system he analyzes, they scrape by employing labour arbitrage at a cheap production site, but do not unleash the productivity gains we associate with industrial production.

This becomes obvious when you look at the distribution of construction costs for a finished building:
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/construction-cost-breakdown-and-partial

The most a prefab can hope to achieve is attack maybe 30- 40% of the total costs in that pie chart. You cannot prefab electrics and plumbing, foundation, landscaping, permitting etc. So even if they crush it and get 100% improvement on their products compared to on site build, that's still a 20% at best overall cost improvement.

Bit with that comes the risk of a new and unproven system, costly coordination issues that are easy to rectify in the traditional method -
but if the wrong prefabs are shipped across the country you are dead for a few weeks, since the next stage cannot start.

I recently read Construction Physics' post on concrete use:

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-use-less-concrete

and I consider it to be required reading for people outside of the field on the topic of concrete emissions. Globally, concrete production emits like crazy but this is largely a product of scale; other building materials emit far more GhGs by mass and volume but are used in much smaller quantities than concrete.

I'm all for a broad package of carbon taxes to both reduce growth and force the development of political and financial solutions for a low-growth, steady-state or degrowth economy but don't be misled into thinking the end result is a smaller share of concrete as a building material. More likely, carbon taxes will reduce the proportions of plastics, steel, aluminum and glass in construction in favour of more concrete.

Trades are one of those areas (along with software engineering) where it is relatively easy to be your own boss. The market in general is pretty competitive on both the buyer (lots of individual homeowners needing work done) and seller (lots of small independent contractors selling their labor) sides; that should make overall prices & wages reflect industry-wide (or at least local) supply & demand pretty well.

ConstructionPhysics has a pretty good series about why the construction industry never really realized economies of scale the way most other industries do. Even when you have large homebuilders like D.R. Horton, their primary competitive advantage is usually reduced cost of capital, which goes away if capital becomes expensive for everyone.

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-there-so-few-economies-of

>Using US houses as an example is quite laughable, the energy consumptions of US households is much higher than German ones.

It's an extremely heterogeneous dataset, but a cursory analysis does not agree:

Germany: 136 kWh/m^2

https://bpie.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iBROAD_CountryFactsheet_GERMANY-2018.pdf

US: 47000 Btu/ft^2 — because we like dumb units — 148 kWh/m^2

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/looking-at-energy-use-in-us-residential?s=r

That's a slight win for Germany, but it's not by much. For the most part, US houses are simply larger than German ones, which is where that energy use comes from. (US temperatures are also harsher, in both directions.)

It may be less important, but still an important consideration.

In regards to nuclear costs, most comparisons include projects which were plagued by redesign due to regulatory changes. It is likely that reusing designs will reduce costs significantly [0].

In addition, solar and wind must be paired with energy storage. Once this is done, they become uneconomical in most places. There's a reason that Europe, the most pro-solar/wind polity on the planet, has not been able to get energy independence despite their wealth. The costs for a resilient system are just too high.

[0] https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction

Might be nitpicking here: Referring to the pie charts under this section[1], I can't help but think images like this are intentionally meant to mislead: [1]https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/why-are-nuclear-power-construction?s=r#%C2%A7power-plant-and-electricity-economics

I understand author picked it from some other source, Dawson 2017 or whatever.

These pie charts are not like for like, when it includes the renewables -- maybe the coal/gas/nuclear fine. So why put them next to one another. I can't tell if the costs of renewables are for entire "farms" (solar or wind farms). What about lifetime of plants/farms, total value derived, etc.