Market-leading eco-warriors
Margareta Pagano visits Kingspan, a family-run firm at the forefront of zero-carbon building technology It’s bleak, cold and nearly dusk at Kingspan’s industrial estate at Holywell in north Wales. Gene Murtagh runs up a ladder to show off a roof garden made with Kingspan’s insulated panels, which are being tested to see how much soil they can take. Roof gardens are a must-have for all self-respecting ecowarriors — like bobble hats. ‘Buildings are like your body — 70 per cent of heat is lost from the roof,’ explains the young Irish entrepreneur. He runs off again, across to the 20-kilowatt turbine to check the wind strength: lousy today, because of the cold.
But the turbine, together with the solar panels on the roof of Kingspan’s visitors’ centre, is generating enough electricity to run the offices. Inside, Murtagh can check the efficiency of his self-sufficiency: a screen monitor measures the building’s energy consumption, and theoretical energy savings, in real time. Today it shows 1.7 tonnes of CO2 generation have been averted over the last few months, while 71,000 litres of rain water have been collected to flush the toilets.
Although he doesn’t seem to feel the cold, Murtagh is not your usual tree-hugger in his Dublin brown suit and striped tie. But he’s as fervent as any evangelist about conserving energy. He’s talking his own book too: Kingspan, the Irish-based ‘sustainable construction’ company he runs, makes tons of money from soaring demand for the zero-carbon products and technologies it has quietly pioneered for the last two decades.
Gordon Brown has decreed that all new houses and buildings in Britain must be zerocarbon-rated by 2016. Kingspan is already the market leader in the ‘off-site building revolution’, making insulated panels, boards and floor systems. Now it’s working flat out to come up with even better technologies for Brown’s deadline. One result is Kingspan’s ‘passive’ house, to be exhibited at the Watford Building Research Establishment later this year. The home will have every conceivable gadget — photovoltaics for heating water and electricity, special containers for rain and chopping up waste, geo-thermal pipes taking hot air from the ground into the home, and an air-handling unit to filter and recycle hot air.
But Murtagh has a word of warning for those who are keen to do their own eco-thing — don’t waste money on fancy renewable systems or stick windmills in your garden just yet. Otherwise you’ll be ‘goosed’. The fabric of the building is critical and insulation is still the absolute essential. Reducing consumption is the first thing to get right: insulate your roof and walls, triple-glaze your windows, then look at the energy source.
It’s good advice. The payback on many of today’s renewable energy systems is still horribly long: at Kingspan’s Irish site the wind turbine will take ten years to pay for itself; at Holywell it will take even longer: ‘We could make all our sites self-sufficient but the benefit is not good enough. There has to be a balance between what’s practical and desirable. Government needs to help people and industry until the cost and efficiency of renewable systems becomes more realistic.’ Tax credits or grants to motivate people to invest in alternatives are the quickest way. ‘Another way is to make energy sources like oil so expensive that you force people to change. But that’s not practical either.’ It’s not so much about climate change but a climate for change, says Murtagh. ‘Like it or not, the environmental debate is fast becoming semi-religious. But forget the moral argument, even the economics of saving energy make sense. There’s security in having your own supplies not dependent on overseas countries — and fossil fuels are running out.’ He’s indecently young at 35 to be chief executive of a €2.8 billion company. Being part of the family helps — his father, Eugene, now 64, founded the company and is chairman; an uncle, Brendan, is a director. But Murtagh’s four siblings have taken dif ferent paths: his brothers are respectively a pilot, an architect and a banker and his youngest sister is a fashion designer in Paris.
Kingspan is an inspiring tale of derring-do. Eugene Murtagh was a fitter, leaving school to make trailers behind the pub in Kingscourt where he grew up. He built up the business in the 1970s in County Cavan, and Kingspan was floated on the Dublin and London stock markets ten years ago. The family’s 20 per cent stake crowns the Murtaghs as Ireland’s richest family, beating even the O’Reilly clan. They have 43 manufacturing plants in 28 countries around the world, employing 6,000 people. Half of the group’s business is in the UK, but there is also a big slice in central and eastern Europe. The structures are used in buildings as diverse as Daniel Libeskind’s Orion PostGraduate Centre in London and the Dutch Aviodrome aviation museum.
Kingspan has a big reputation in the building trade but its financial success is less well recognised. Only six years ago the City’s attitude was so negative that the family considered taking it private again. But there has been a sea-change — helped by compound earnings growth of 30 per cent per annum — and the shares have rocketed. They bounced again after another set of record earnings last month.
Gene Murtagh may be young but he’s a man in a hurry: the USA is the next country to conquer. Earlier acquisitions there have been tricky but he’s looking to make more before the market for sustainable building takes off. ‘Who would have thought 12 months ago that Al Gore would win an Oscar — the mind-shift in the US has been incredible. The US is the biggest market in the world for us and we want to be there quickly.’ The key to getting there lies in inventing new and better methods of construction: his research people work with German engineers on solar, the Norwegians on geo-thermals and Mitsubishi on air-filters. Kingspan is also at the cutting-edge in production methods: inside this enormous factory, insulated panels are churned out by the kilometer on conveyor belts the length of runways. Sandwiches of steel travel along the belts to be filled with phenolic material — a gooey concoction of chemicals — which rises like dough under the intense heat to create an insulating foam filling, like a giant chocolate wafer biscuit. Coating the panels with surprisingly naturallooking faux-stone or wood surfaces, and making the panels recyclable, are among the latest experiments.
But next on Murtagh’s long list of targets is the installation of a 2-megawatt wind turbine; this is serious muscle and should provide the factory — making €200m worth of panels each year — with three quarters of its energy. ‘Be careful,’ he whispers, ‘I’m giving you sensitive information here.’ But he goes on to throw caution aside: ‘I don’t like to predict but in five years’ time I reckon we’ll have doubled the company.’ Then he dashes to take the plane back to Dublin before flying on to his new venture in Turkey. And there’s not a bobble hat in sight.
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