The building sector has been identified as a sector with large potential for delivering energy savings and mitigation of GHG emissions. Yet it has been unclear what the specific role of building energy efficiency codes play in achieving these savings. Thererfore, between July 2011 and June 2012 the Global Buildings Performance Network, facilitated the development of scenarios for energy savings and GHG mitigation related to thermal energy efficiency in buildings and an international survey of the impact of policy best-practices.

Recognising both the recent surge in interest in low carbon refurbishments of residential buildings and the diversity of emergent terminology and perspectives, the authors set out definitions for key terms and frame a discussion of the phenomenon of refurbishments. The paper focuses on owner-occupied detached homes that dominate Australia’s existing residential building stock.

Abstract: All forms of economic production and exchange involve the use of energy directly and in the transformation of materials. Until recently, cheap and seemingly limitless fossil energy has allowed most of society to ignore the importance of contributions to the economic process from the biophysical world as well as the potential limits to growth. This paper centres on assessing the energy costs of modern day society and its relation to GDP.

Creating sustainable cities requires rethinking the built environment, a fundamental component of mitigating the environmental impacts of buildings. To evaluate this, stakeholders in Australia increasingly rely on third party verification via green building rating schemes. These rating schemes address and encourage a variety of green features which are incorporated into the design and construction of a building.

Mandatory civil building energy efficiency codes strictly govern the energy consumption of new buildings in China. As the promotion of building energy efficiency in China has increased in recent years, compliance with mandatory civil building energy efficiency codes has also improved, increasing from less than 10% in 2000 to nearly 100% in 2012, a remarkable achievement. However, because the promotion of energy efficiency strategies in China has followed a unique pattern, some researchers doubt these statistics.

The energy benefits of increased code compliance have generally been viewed through the lens of energy savings – kWh and therms. Peak demand reduction as an additional benefit of increased code compliance is a comparatively unexplored area – despite a general acknowledgement that there are electric demand savings (kW) associated with increased energy code compliance. The ability to include peak demand reduction as a component of the code compliance savings has important and significant benefits.

The energy demand in the residential building sector represents a big challenge for Albania, Montenegro, and Serbia. Within our project entitled “Support for Low Emission Development in South East Europe”, the authors developed residential building topologies and using them as an input, designed and applied bottom-up simulation models to assess the impact of decarbonisation policy packages applied to this sector. The models were prepared in co-operation with national policymakers in the LEAP software, for which they were trained in a parallel project.

In 2009 the Washington State Legislature updated the legislation authorizing the Washington State Energy Code (WSEC). In the process, the legislature also set a goal that the total energy of new buildings would be reduced 70% over the performance of buildings built to the 2006 WSEC by the 2031 code cycle. To meet this ambitious goal the Washington State Building Code Council (SBCC) was authorized to develop incremental steps that would achieve this goal over the eight code cycles anticipated by 2031. The first step on that path was developed for the 2009 WSEC.

The purpose of this paper is to present data and discussion on a critical review of a sample of multi-storey and mixed use residential buildings in the subtropical city of Brisbane in order to understand how contemporary buildings are achieving local authority policy outcomes and resident-identified attributes of locally-appropriate subtropical living.

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) issued a FOA (Funding Opportunity Announcement) to conduct residential energy code field studies using a radically different methodology from previous studies. Historically, studies defined and measured “compliance” as the portion of all code requirements being met on a house-by-house basis. Compliance was assumed to be a surrogate for energy, but that connection was never empirically established.

Building sector accounts for a large percentage of the total national energy consumption in most of the countries, thus it is critical to formulate and implement appropriate energy saving policies in the building sector. This paper focuses on energy saving policies in the building sector by conducting a comparative study between Japan and China. The exiting Building Energy Saving (BES) policies, actual effectiveness of policy implementation and obstacles to the effective policy implementation are compared in sequence.

In Australia, there is an increasing interest in using extensive green roofs to make buildings more sustainable and provide a number of social, ecological, aesthetic and thermal benefits to cities. The potential of green roofs to reduce building energy consumption has been extensively studied overseas in a variety of different climates. However, in Australia the green roof industry is relatively new. There is still very little information on the thermal properties of Australian green roofs and their performance.

A significant body of research confirms the major contribution that improved building performance can make to national energy and greenhouse abatement policies. The challenge facing governments is how best to realize the potential of energy efficient buildings. This paper reviews the effectiveness of economic instruments for building energy policy compared with alternative interventions such as building regulation and information campaigns.

This paper quantifies the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions co-benefits associated with water, waste and transportation usage in certified green commercial office buildings in California. The study compares the measured values of water, waste and transportation usage self-reported by office buildings certified under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system for Existing Building Operations and Maintenance (LEED EBOM) to baseline values of conventional California office buildings.

The United States (US) Clean Power Plan established state-specific carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reduction goals for fossil fuel-fired electricity generating units (EGUs). States may achieve these goals through multiple mechanisms, including measures that can achieve equivalent CO2 reductions such as residential energy efficiency, which will have important co-benefits. Here, we develop state-resolution simulations of the economic, health, and climate benefits of increased residential insulation, considering EGUs and residential combustion.

The contribution of buildings to climate change has become widely acknowledged. On 3 December 2015, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) held the first ‘buildings day’ at COP 21 (the UN Climate Change Conference) devoted to the decarbonization of the building stock. There are several forms of negative contributions that buildings make to climate change, but high on the list are embodied and operational energy demands, which largely depend on fossil fuels and result in greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, 37 states, covering almost 90% of the US population, have adopted at least the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Adoption is only the first step to more efficient buildings. To generate the promised energy savings, builders need to comply with the code. There have been many studies done to evaluate code compliance over the years, however, different studies use different methodologies; making it difficult to compare within or across states as well as across time.

Improvements in building energy codes cannot be fully realized unless targeted stakeholder education, training and outreach is provided to support increased understanding of and compliance with the minimum requirements. With Michigan’s adoption of the 2012 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), an analysis determined statewide annual energy savings of approximately 480,000 MMBtu and $4 million in annual utility bill savings for homeowners from bringing below code residential new construction up to minimum requirements.

Most large developing countries have a building energy code or other building efficiency policies. However, testing and rating systems to assess the energy performance of building materials often lag behind these codes and policies. Building materials play a key role in setting the energy footprint of a building. Poorly performing or poorly labeled materials can result in higher energy use and lack of market incentives to produce high efficiency products.

In Europe, the latest updates in the directive on the energy performance of buildings introduced two fundamental concepts, namely the cost-optimal energy requirements and the nearly-zero energy buildings (nZEB). Although these concepts are related, the cost-optimal is focused on costs while the nZEB prioritise the energy performance and the use of renewable energy harvested on site.