UK and EU: How energy efficient could your building be? Perhaps you are putting together a budget and you want to know what measures you can most cost-effectively take. Perhaps you are a builder with a whole lot of buildings to renovate.
And there are a lot of buildings out there that will still be around in the middle of the century, leaking energy like dinosaurs alongside the shiny new zero carbon buildings. Most of them in fact.
Architecture in the 21st century will be defined by how low carbon it is. It pays to save energy. It contributes to the common good to save carbon emissions.
Building regs are changing
Building regulations are changing in most countries to adjust to the climate emergency. In the UK Part Z of the regulations will be consulted upon next year.
Part Z requires mandatory reporting of cradle to grave whole life carbon emissions of a building from 2023, a date chosen to help the UK meet its commitment to reduce carbon to 68 per cent below 1990s level by 2030.
The embodied carbon part of the whole life carbon of buildings is calculated using the quantities of materials used in the building and the Built Environment Carbon Database, which, when completed, is supposed to tell you the embodied carbon of most common building materials.
Part Z – not yet law but being integrated already by some builders – is supported by developers Barratt Homes, Lendlease, Thakeham Group, Greencore Construction and The Offsite Homes Alliance, writes Tim den Dekker.
Some building materials are very carbon intensive. Tim adds “Rather than precluding potentially carbon-intensive products, [the requirements] should encourage innovation towards efficient design and lower-carbon equivalents. Housebuilders have indicated they would welcome this”.
The energy efficiency renovation Decision Support Tool
The new Decision Support Tool, from EERAdata, a European project from the Technical University in Munich, can help you to identify building stock that could be upgraded to be more sustainable and energy efficient.
EERAdata says it “aims to accelerate the implementation of the ‘energy efficiency first’ principle across Europe by supporting policy-makers to effectively assess the impacts of EE investments, with an initial focus on investments in buildings”.
It has been piloted with three local authorities: the City of Copenhagen in Denmark, the Municipality of Velenje in Slovenia, and the Andalusian Energy Agency in Spain.
The EERAdata Decision Support Tool (DST) uses five successive modules to complete an analysis of energy efficiency building potential.
To use it, building and municipal data is first prepared and integrated into the DST databases. Then the energy demand and consumption of one or multiple buildings is calculated and feeds into the life cycle and indoor environment assessment modules.
The results are then monetised and further evaluated in the socio-economic assessment module. The final module, the supply side assessment module, then estimates the cost benefits of alternative supply side investments, compared to the previously calculated energy efficiency investments.
Pilot the demo for free
You’re invited to trial the tool; through this link you can access the online demo site. A short email to the creators will unlock a demo account for you.
Or you could use the stand-alone package to test the software with your own buildings and datasets. Just contact EERA to receive a link to a downloadable and installable file, accompanied with all the necessary instructions. You can then install the EERAdata DST on your system and integrate your own building data sets, weather files, LifeCycle Assessment data, etc. into the system.
Renovation Scenarios
There are a number of different renovation scenarios that are opportunities for introducing energy efficiency in which you might use a tool like this. Let’s look at an emergency renovation scenario, scheduled maintenance renovation scenario, long-term deep renovation scenario and a building renovation business case scenario.
- Emergency renovation fixes current and unavoidable damages, failures and errors, it is an emergency plan. This usually has a fixed budget and the short-term timescale.
- Scheduled maintenance renovation, by contrast, is a preventive governance model with a fixed budget every year. Buildings get checked every four years or so and their condition gets assessed.
- Long-term deep renovation involves the deployment of profound energy efficiency and renovation measures. Every project is individual and undergoes an individual assessment, planning, and financing process.
- Business case renovation happens when for example the city government asks all departments to save on administrative budget every year by 2 per cent in order to make the administration more efficient. The building sector, with high energy and maintenance costs, plays a major role in these plans.
In all cases, a significant budget can be saved with cost-efficient measures. The implementation of energy efficiency by for example installing a building management system or more efficient heating setting or even renovation measures can deliver long-term savings by creating multiple benefits as a bonus to the financial improvement. Due to the clear focus on saving money, the projects in this plan are almost only placed on financial indicators, of which the payback time is the most important one.
The DST tool will help to create business cases by assessing multiple options. It can calculate the payback rate, incorporating socio-economic benefits which will reduce the payback times of certain projects.
You don’t have to have extensive technical knowledge and data to use the full functionality of the tool, the authors say.
