Various policies targeting at building energy efficiency have been promulgated by the Chinese government in the past decade. However, few studies evaluate if China is on the right path to meet its energy goals through these policies by providing an assessment of their effect in reducing energy consumption in residential buildings or the feasibility of such policies to catalyze these reductions.

Australia’s current national emissions reduction target is to reduce emissions to 26-28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. As a signatory to the Paris Agreement, Australia has committed to the goal of reducing global emissions to net zero emissions and to five yearly reviews of the national target starting from 2020, with the requirement that new pledges be higher than the previous pledge and reflect the highest possible level of ambition.

Buildings can balance the grid through proactive energy demand management and can play a leading role in transforming the EU energy market, shifting from centralised, fossil-fuel-based systems towards a decentralised, renewable, interconnected and variable system. Many actors agree that buildings have a role in shaping the Energy Market Design Initiative.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Energy Codes Program (BECP) periodically evaluates national and state-level impacts associated with energy codes in residential and commercial buildings. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), funded by DOE, conducted an assessment of the prospective impacts of national model building energy codes from 2010 through 2040. A previous PNNL study evaluated the impact of the Building Energy Codes Program; this study looked more broadly at overall code impacts.

Developed as a common EU framework of core indicators for the sustainability of office and residential buildings, Level(s) provides a set of indicators and common metrics for measuring the environmental performance of buildings along their life cycle. As well as environmental performance, which is the main focus, it also enables other important related aspects of the performance of buildings to be assessed using indicators for health and comfort, life cycle cost and potential future risks to performance.

The ABRACADABRA project is developing a toolkit, targeting policy makers, with a focus on regulatory challenges and opportunities for boosting energy retrofitting of buildings. For this purpose, the project will investigate regulatory issues, as well as available good practices, in the project’s target countries (Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Romania, Spain, and the Netherlands).

The “Clean Energy for All Europeans” package confirms the pivotal role of the EU building stock in meeting EU 2030 climate and energy targets. In fact, the projected decarbonisation of the EU energy system is mainly based on the renovation of existing buildings and the increased penetration of renewable energies in heating, cooling and power generation.

This document is the companion to parts 1 and 2 of the guidance on how to use Level(s). In part 1 a general introduction to Level(s) is provided, together with in Part 2 an overview of the macro-objectives, performance indicators and the three Levels of performance assessment (Level(s) - Part 1 and 2). The three Levels are:

Retrofitting has been proposed as a method to significantly reduce energy consumption and emission derived from the housing sector. Having said this it remains clear that severe restraints remain; and the concept of a “one solution fits all” is at the very least unrealistic. As it has been repeatedly supported via the Abracadabra project any potential solution must deal with significantly complex issues at technical, legislative and regulatory levels, and of course at financial and economic levels.

Cities are increasingly taking actions such as building code enforcement, urban planning, and public transit expansion to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in their communities and municipal operations. However, many cities lack the quantitative information needed to estimate policy impacts and prioritize city actions in terms of carbon abatement potential and cost effectiveness. This report fills this research gap by providing methodologies to assess the carbon abatement potential of a variety of city actions.

In NSW more than 10% of households and small business premises have installed a solar photovoltaic (PV) system (commonly called solar panels). When these solar customers use the electricity generated by their solar panels rather than buying electricity from their retailer, they save money. When they don’t use all this electricity themselves, the excess amount is exported to the grid, and they may be paid a ‘solar feed-in tariff’ for this electricity.

Discussion paper and roadmap Stage 1 for commercial, institutional, and government buildings and fitouts

In a prior study entitled “Mapping of Existing Energy Efficiency Standards and Technologies in Buildings in the UNECE Region”, the UN Committee on Housing and Land Management (CHLM) and the Committee on Sustainable Energy (CSE) commissioned a comparative study on building standards in the UNECE region. The current report follows up on this by analyzing the actual prevalence of specific types of energy-efficient technologies in the buildings sector in the UNECE region, along with the levels and types of public policy interventions supporting their implementations.

This report is the Interim Technical Report for the Building Code Energy Performance Trajectory Project. It accompanies the Interim Synthesis Report for the Building Code Energy Performance Trajectory Project, entitled The Bottom Line – the household impacts of delaying improved energy requirements in the Building Code and which was published on the 8th of February 2018, providing more detail on the assumptions behind and the preliminary results from the underlying modelling work.

The report provides the following key items:

In 2017, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) developed its 2016 Stretch Code Supplement to the 2016 New York State Energy Conservation Construction Code. Since 2017, NYSERDA has continued to develop the 2018 edition, as part of the efforts to achieve a statewide Net Zero Energy Code by 2028.

This paper on the zero carbon and circular challenge in the built environment puts forward several policy recommendations. In order to achieve the net-zero carbon goal by 2050, adapting the built environment is paramount: the EU estimates that the climate change-related damage to infrastructure could grow tenfold under a business-as-usual scenario. The paper advocates the need to come up with a comprehensive strategy for the building and construction sector which should build on the principles of sustainability and circularity.

This report is a product of the collaborative research project ‘Validating and Improving the BASIX Assessment Tool for Low-Carbon Dwellings’. Initiated by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the New South Wales Government, this project addresses the policy need for post-occupancy evaluation of the BASIX tool by measuring the actual energy consumption of BASIX-compliant dwellings.