Best Practice Policies for Low Carbon & Energy Buildings

The purpose of the project is to construct and finalize energy and GHG emission scenarios that estimate the contribution the building sector can make to ambitious climate change mitigation goals. The scenarios focus on heating, cooling and hot water. The scenarios are based on the CEU 3CSEP’s earlier building energy scenario work for the IPCC, the Global Energy Assessment and the UNEP SBCI. This work involves a novel performance-based methodology. To accomplish the objectives of this project, funded by the Global Building Performance Network (GBPN), the scenarios and the underlying databases will be updated and made more robust. This will result in the improvement of the database and the accuracy described in the scenarios.

The goal of the work is to develop an extensively detailed and robust set of building energy use scenarios of the world (with four key regions explicitly examined: US, China, Europe and India). These scenarios can then be used as a reference during climate negotiations and related work.

The outcomes of the modeling work will show the trends of energy use dynamics in global and regional building sectors and building types, as well as the potential for energy use and GHG emissions reduction due to ambitious and worldwide proliferation of energy efficient and renewable energy best-practices in buildings, and give critical input toward prioritization of GBPN activities.

The project will also give the opportunity to estimate the lock-in effect of energy savings, illustrating to policy-makers and scientific community the potential, necessity and urgency of ambitious steps in buildings policy. Review of existing modeling studies will have two outcomes. First, it will allow for the determination of the differences between modeling approaches, scopes and assumptions, and second, provide the ability to compare and calibrate the results of the elaborated model. The results will help inform the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report chapter on buildings.