Get Sust! Issue 25

Which way next for European building codes?

In November 2006, the International Energy Agency (IEA) Standing Group on Long-Term Co-operation (SLT) and Committee on Energy Research & Technology (CERT) organised an international workshop to discuss the challenges posed by the G8 Gleneagles summit.

The focus of the meeting was to explored key technology and policy themes relating to energy efficiency in buildings; in particular to demonstrate the role that research and development plays towards improving the energy performance of the building stock.

A significant proportion of the discussions focused on how R&D can support future improvements. For example, energy efficiency analyst Jens H Laustsen discussed “Developing future indicators of energy efficiency in buildings”.

He reported that current indicators only show general international or regional trends; more significantly, most don’t include cooling - a serious oversight, given the likely expansion of comfort cooling in the growing economies of India and China.

Lausten’s presentation said that there is an urgent need to be able to compare building codes from around the world. He estimates there are around 1000 of these. First, he suggests that it is crucial to separate out the new build from existing buildings, because (quite logically) having the two together skews the data. Secondly he proposes to group codes by climate (in terms of energy use in buildings there are six basic types). And thirdly, it is clearly nonsensical to compare some aspects of the codes - even within the climate groups - so it is important to decide what indicators can sensibly be compared. Laustsen suggests “lifetime costs” - because this indicator can be applied either to the building as a whole, or to individual elements of the fabric, or to energy-saving measures.

Wolfgang Eichhammer, of the Fraunhofer Institute (Systems and Innovation Research) is also interested in indicators, but the focus of his presentation was how best to gather the data upon which the indicators are based. His studies suggest that surveys in combination with market research will generate good data at low cost; another possibility is instruments that generate their own database (using the building energy management system, BEMS, for instance).

Learn more:

	•	IEA (2006). Energy Efficiency in Buildings: Meeting the G8 Gleneagles Challenge, 27-28 November 2006. Presentations are available at: www.iea.org.
	•	For more information, contact the IEA. E-mail: Jeppe.Bjerg@iea.org.