Building Code Tightens amid Global Warming Part 1

 

Many UK non-domestic buildings often use twice as much energy and emit twice as much carbon dioxide as the professionals who designed them predicted.

 

  • Many UK non-domestic buildings often use twice as much energy and emit twice as much carbon dioxide as the professionals who designed them predicted.
  • This massive underestimation of how much energy a building will use is a problem because the UK's buildings account for nearly 50 per cent of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions.
  • The government has an ambitious target of reducing national greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050, with an immediate reduction target of 34 percent by 2020.
  • The researchers believe this will not be achieved unless the UK construction industry acts swiftly to address 'not fit for purpose' building modelling professionals.

The study found a new reason for the 'performance gap' -- the difference between how much energy a building is predicted to use and how much it uses in reality. 

Architects or engineers have known about this 'gap' for a long time, even if most homeowners or facilities managers have not. 

Building modelling professionals have blamed everyone from the builder not installing insulation correctly to the occupants leaving the lights on, but have never asked if they might be part of the problem.

The 'performance gap' is a problem that affects all new buildings as well as the refurbishment of older ones.

Previous research has assumed the 'performance gap' can be attributed to the construction and operation stages. 

However, we have revealed a new cause for the 'performance gap', that being the modelling illiteracy of building modelling professionals arising from the modelers being separated from the rest of the construction process and the final building.

The impact of the inaccuracies of building modelling professionals has severe financial and environmental implications for both the government's global warming targets as well as building owners who are purchasing homes and other buildings that are sold to be energy efficient but in reality, are not.

The 'performance gap' is somewhat similar to the Volkswagen emission scandal in which large numbers of VW cars were found to have a gap between the performance promised by the car manufacturer and how their cars performed in reality, with some VW cars being found to emit up to 40 times more pollution than allowed.

In the first research of its kind, 108 building modelling professionals about 21 common design energy-related aspects of a building, from the insulation in the walls to the temperature the heating was set to.

The questioning was based on a real building in which detailed energy, occupancy and temperature data had been recorded, and provided a comparison with the answers of those surveyed.

The researchers found that the building modelling professionals could not agree on which aspects were important and which were not, or how much difference to the energy bill changes to them would make. 

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