Energy sustainability studies on under-construction buildings: baseline for tomorrow’s policy

Abstract

In the past decade, building research in Asia has been found to have diverged into a relatively less treaded subject of embodied energy (EE) assessment of buildings across their size and construction types as has been reported by several studies. As buildings are complex entities and known to be highly energy intensive, EE contributes a major share in energy use and carbon emission over their life-cycle. While the focus of most policies remains on operational energy of buildings, the energy embodied in the building fabric has, so far, escaped critical scrutiny. However, demand of housing coupled with the pace and scale of urbanization in Asian countries have triggered an unprecedented real estate surge, which translates into accelerated energy consumption during the making of the buildings itself. Thus, the cumulative effect of the embodied energy no longer remains a benign issue in the broader context of energy sustainability and optimization in the building sector. With this in view, this paper presents a base-line study of embodied energy assessment of some real estate case-studies, comprising of multi-storied residential apartments of steel reinforced cement concrete frame structure in and around the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata) in India. The buildings selected are at different life-cycle stages and the results thus obtained appear to be potential inputs for future policy actions.