Feature articles

Buildings, stretching from construction through use to demolition, account for two-fifths of global final energy demand. They are responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and pollution on a large scale, producing one-third of energy-related CO2 emissions, two-thirds of halogens, and as much as one-third of black carbon.

For midcentury climate stabilization targets to be met, transition to a low-carbon or green economy will be needed within a tight timescale, and this will mean urgently tackling the multiple challenges related to building energy use. Architecture 2030, an independent non-profit organization, in 2006 proposed the “2030 Challenge,” tasking the global architecture and building community with adopting a plan for making new buildings and major renovations carbon-neutral by 2030, an aim that has since been echoed by numerous bodies, including the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in 2008.

Recent major advances in building design, materials know-how, technology, and policy have opened the way to possibly significant declines in global building energy use. Present and foreseen cutting-edge technologies can reduce energy consumption of new appliances, IT, and other electricity-using equipment in buildings by up to 65 percent by 2020, compared with the current baseline. Longer-term projections of technology improvements are speculative, but likely to provide significant additional improvement.

With installation of on-site and community-scale renewable energy sources, it is now possible for many buildings and/or communities to become zero net energy consumers and GHG emitters, or even net energy suppliers, without their energy service delivery in any way being compromised. The new advances, which can be applied to new building schemes or retrofitted to the existing building stock, are not only cost-effective, but have the potential to provide enormous financial savings and to generate massive related benefits—for health, the environment, and the economy. Despite this, however, they are not being widely adopted. Why is this?

Building Green CSET (left), the Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies at the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, is China’s first zero-emissions building. Green Lighthouse (right), at the University of Copenhagen, is Denmark’s first public carbon-neutral building.

Standing in the way of achieving energy-saving opportunities in the building sector is a wide range of strong barriers that are highly variable by location, building type, culture, and stakeholder group. Perhaps the strongest barrier in this category is a major lack of technical, economic, and general knowledge related to low-energy buildings that exists not only “at the sharp end” among building designers and architects, but also among politicians, investors, tenants, and consumers. On the design side, designers are not up to speed on how best to incorporate efficiency practices (often framed in building code requirements) into building design. Even if efficient buildings are designed, the building construction industry in all countries remains largely unaware of the environmental impacts of its operations or is not prepared to apply these measures practically on site.

Most barriers could be overcome or mitigated through policies and innovative financing schemes, but because of their large number and diversity, no single instrument can unlock their potential. For example, the price of carbon would need to be very high indeed (above US$60/ton CO2), according to current research, and sustained over a long period, to make a significant dent in energy demand from the very complex and multidimensional building sector. This is why portfolios of policies, tailored to different target groups and to specific sets of barriers, are necessary for optimal results.

It is suggested that a combination of motivational instruments— sticks (regulations), carrots (incentives), and tambourines (information or public leadership programs)—is needed to unlock the energy-savings potential in buildings.

As far as “sticks” are concerned, stringent and well-enforced building and appliance standards, codes, and labeling should be made obligatory for all new buildings and retrofits. The Swiss MINERGIE standard, a voluntary scheme, would provide a good basis for a mandatory one.

In poor countries, subsidies on energy price, which encourage energy use and thus wastage, should be minimized to absolutely necessary situations and periods and applied instead to capital investment into energy efficiency improvements and sustainable energy generation, which will deliver cheaper and cleaner energy services for a greater number of people. “Carrots” would include the use of energy pricing and taxation to encourage efficiency. In France, for example, new buildings respecting certain environmental criteria can be exempt from property tax for 15–30 years.

For the “tambourines,” capacity-building efforts to retrain all stakeholders in the construction process as well as consumers, building owners, operators, and dwellers must take place. In most countries the creation of comprehensive, integrated programs at universities and other educational establishments is needed to train current and future building professionals in the design and construction of low-energy buildings. The development of pilot projects is helpful to demonstrate the effectiveness and the everyday functionality of the new buildings to the public and investors. In this context, the role of the public sector as an early adopter is crucial. The development of the Passivhaus scheme in Germany has been instrumental in the strong development of lowenergy buildings over the past decade. It is further hoped that through lifestyle, cultural, and behavioral changes, still further significant reductions in building energy use will be possible.

Yet even a combination of tailored policies and the bestthought- out implementation strategies cannot obscure the fact that three billion people in our world still have no access to clean, modern, energy services, relying instead on low-quality fuels for cooking and heating. Around 25 percent of the global population also lack access to electricity, with major implications for human development. Even where electricity is available, many suffer in developing and developed countries alike from “energy poverty,” commonly defined as the inability to obtain adequate energy services for 10 percent of household income. Therefore, reductions in final building energy demand must go hand-in-hand with supplying everyone with sufficient thermal comfort, a concept that, itself, differs from culture to culture.

This feature article was published in the Summer 2010 edition of Options magazine.

Further information

The SOLANOVA Project; the Global Energy Assessment

Diana Ürge-Vorsatz, Professor and Director of the Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy (3CSEP), Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, is Coordinating Lead Author of Knowledge Module 10, Energy End-Use (Efficiency): Buildings, of the Global Energy Assessment.

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Last updated: 08 Jul 2010