A Scottish housebuilding company has unveiled plans for a state-of-the-art, environmentally friendly home.

Aberdeen-based Stewart Milne Group is developing a prototype house which it hopes will be the UK's first five-star near-zero carbon (carbon neutral) house.

It will use a wind turbine, solar chimney and water- saving devices to cut down on emissions and maximise energy efficiency.

The construction group has also promised that the home, which will be unveiled in June, will be affordable.

It comes after the UK government specified that all new homes should be carbon neutral within a decade and introduced stamp duty exemption for houses that are.

Stewart Milne's house will meet the government's new Code for Sustainable Homes, which gives a star rating similar to that allocated to some electrical appliances.

The maximum rating is six stars, for an absolutely carbon neutral design and will be given to a group of environmentally friendly homes run from the same energy source. The house being built by Stewart Milne aims for a five-star rating, the highest available to individual houses.

Liz Murray, researcher at Friends of the Earth Scotland, said: "This is a welcome move by one of the country's leading housebuilders. It is absolutely critical that in the next few years all developers move towards building carbon neutral homes and buildings.

"The key is maximising energy efficiency of these homes in the first instance and embedding within the design a means by which energy can be generated as part of the structure. The sooner all developers do this the better."

Energy used for providing hot water, and heating, cooling and lighting homes accounts for 34% of our energy consumption and 33% of our greenhouse gas emissions, according to official figures.

The design of the new houses will help reduce that by including a wind turbine on the roof, a solar chimney, a fitted bathroom pod, open-tread stairs to let the air circulate, and under-floor heating.

Water-saving devices will keep use below 80 litres per person per day.

At present, fitting all the environmentally friendly devices adds around 20% to the cost of a new house. But the Stewart Milne Group is confident it can get the cost down to a lot less as work on the design continues.

Glenn Allison, managing director, said: "The single biggest impact on our business will be climate change and we felt we should take an industry lead by building a commercially viable house that reflected the government's objective to achieve zero carbon houses within a decade.

"Our decision to create this potentially five-star house as a commercial reality gives us the opportunity to show key influencers in the housing sector that it is feasible to build low carbon houses in an affordable fashion."

The Scottish Executive has set out its ambitions for sustainable buildings and funds the SUST project, based at the Lighthouse in Glasgow.

Lori McElroy, project manager of SUST, welcomed Stewart Milne's announcement yesterday.

"We have been trying to get developers interested in this for a long time," she said. "It is a very positive thing and once you get one housebuilder doing it, hopefully the others will follow suit.

"It is also something we are going to be driven towards through legislation. We are working with such finite resources that we have to think about better ways of doing things."

The executive has published Choosing Our Future which sets outs a way forward for environmental housing.

Last week an architectural strategy, Building Our Legacy, also highlighted the need for new developments to take into account energy use and the environmental impact.