Environmental and health related criteria for buildings - ANEC

IBO - Environmental and Health related Criteria for Buildings
Building assessment systems may use similar indicators but conceptually handle them
differently. These different approaches should be described with their advantages and
disadvantages and conclusions drawn about which concept would be useful for consumers.
Next step was the choice of indicators that had to be exemplified. It led to the following
categories for which an in-depth analysis was carried out:
- Life cycle assessment (LCA) with focus on building material
- Energy demand and CO 2 -emissions with focus on operation phase
- Daylighting
- Emissions on construction site
- Chemicals in building materials / indoor air
2.2. Energy and CO 2 Emissions
Operation phase
Highly aggregated results such as CO 2 emissions or primary energy demand – especially
when summarized over the whole life cycle may lead to losses of important interim results
and optimisation steps which are more relevant to target groups of building rating systems.
End-consumers for example need comprehensible and sufficiently accurate information of
the energy efficiency of both, building envelope and HVAC systems, and guidance which
energy carriers are environmentally-friendly, secure and available at affordable costs.
Therefore, the following bottom-up approach is recommended:
a) Heating or – if more applicable for southern latitudes – cooling and heating energy
demand (assessment of the building envelope, solar passive gains and passive
cooling measures)
b) Delivered energy (assessment of the energy-efficiency of both envelope and HVAC
systems)
c) Primary energy (restricted to the operational phase)
d) CO 2 Emissions (restricted to the operational phase)
e) NO x Emissions, Particulate Matter (restricted to the operational phase)
a) Heating or – if more applicable for southern latitudes – cooling and heating energy
demand
Apart from local climate conditions, heating energy demand is influenced by parameters that
describe the thermal specifications of a building: average U-value, compactness, airtightness
of the building, avoidance of thermal bridges, ventilation losses, and passive solar
gains, cooling energy demand by size of windows and passive cooling measures (like
shading devices, thermal capacity of the building mass, night venting, etc.).
Final Report 5 31 03 2011