A COMPARISON OF BUILDING ENERGY EFFICIENCY STANDARDS

A Comparison of Building Energy Efficiency Standards between UK and China

Table of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION3

2. OVERVIEW OF BUILDING ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND EXISTING BEE REGULATORY FRAMEWORK4

2.1. Heating consumption in buildings4

2.2. Regulatory framework of BEE in China5

2.3. The current status of mandatory codes for BEE8

2.3.1. National BEE regulations development9

2.3.2. Technical specification in the Tianjin building energy efficiency standard (1997 and 2004 update)10

Review of environmental policy instruments11

2.4 Regulatory instruments11

2.4.1 Mandatory codes12

2.4.2 Carbon/energy tax policy12

2.4.3 Voluntary programs14

2.5 Instruments for improving building energy efficiency16

2.6 Building energy codes17

2.6.1 Eco-labeling schemes22

2.7 Policy mix25

2.6.1 Benefits of well-articulated policy mix27

3. METHODOLOGY33

3.1. General buildings typologies and characteristics34

3.2. Heating intensity estimation35

3.3. Water heating consumption36

3.4. Parameters of BEE improvement portfolios37

3.5. Costs42

3.5.1. Incremental cost associated with BEE improvement42

3.5.2. Capital cost of energy supply system44

3.5.3. Cost of fuel resources46

3.5.4. Costs of externalities46

3.5.5. Economic benefit of implementing BEE48

3.5.6. Benefits of cogeneration option (CHP)49

4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS50

4.1. Primary energy supply and carbon emission50

REFERENCES53

A Comparison of Building Energy Efficiency Standards between UK and China

1. Introduction

The concerns about building energy efficiency (BEE) in China have received considerable attention in recent literature (Lang, 2004; Wang et al., 2007; Zhou et al., 2007; Yang et al., 2008; Lee and Chen, 2008; Li, 2008). Wang et al. (2007) develop an interesting approach to set up an indicator that allows evaluating the most cost-effective way of buildings wall insulation in a northern city in China from a building life-cycle analysis perspective. Yang et al. (2008) analyse energy performance of building envelopes in different climate zones in China based on empirical study. Lee and Chen (2008) employ a benchmarking approach to assess the efficiency performance of the Chinese building efficiency regulations relative to the Hong Kong building code (HK-BEAM) in the context of warm climate where cooling demand dominates other energy uses in the buildings. Their results show that compliance with the Chinese building code is about 50% more efficient in energy use than the adoption of Hong Kong code.

However, most of these studies are focused on the demand-side efficiency improvement in buildings and few of them have integrated the dimension of energy supply and fuel choice options, in particular in the context of large-scale district heating in northern China where huge potentials of energy conservation and carbon emission mitigation remain untapped.

In addition, although all these studies suggest the current Chinese BEE1 regulation could be upgraded without significantly incremental costs, explicit quantitative objective regarding the building efficiency advancement from economic analysis perspective has not been specified. This study aims to bridge this gap by coupling the BEE progress and energy supply options in an economic analysis framework. The modelling approach is employed extensively for exploring the energy savings potentials relating to sectoral efficiency policy implementation. In this paper, we model the energy demand scenarios and quantify the relevant cost implications on the basis of a physical-accounting model consisting of space heating and water heating consumption in residential and commercial buildings in a representative northern city of China, along with the upstream energy supply technology ...