&gt;The UK could take bits of land it owns, chuck homes there<p>&quot;Chucking homes there&quot; would be a good place to start improvements, actually.<p>Designing zero-energy homes and offices is not hard, but housing developers have been slow to adopt the practice. Looking around, it seems like most modern house plans&#x2F;blueprints have no preferred orientation to the single greatest energy source: the sun (or if they do then housing developers ignore them). When there&#x27;s literally no &quot;sunward&quot;[1] on the map, then the cheapest of all energy reduction strategies -- passive solar design -- is all but impossible.<p>Why isn&#x27;t the climate zone given on a house plan? Because the assumption is that you&#x27;ll just consume energy (typically fossil fuels) to make up the difference. We&#x27;re designing buildings totally backwards: starting at form and bolting on function.<p>The ideal would be adjustable parameters based on local conditions. South facing windows based on heating-degree-days, overhangs based on latitude, floorplans that adjust to ground topology and microclimate, etc. So you punch in the site conditions (or sense them), hit &quot;compile&quot;, and it spits out blueprints for a zero-energy passive building specifically suited to those exact local conditions.<p>This is more similar to how plants develop -- by sensing and adapting to local conditions, they incrementally design themselves to suit their habitat.<p>[1] <i>that is, south in the northern hemisphere and north in the southern hemisphere</i>