Environmental and health related criteria for buildings - ANEC

IBO - Environmental and Health related Criteria for Buildings
Conclusions and recommendations
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:
f) 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)
g) Delivered energy (assessment of the energy-efficiency of both envelope and HVAC
systems)
h) Primary energy (restricted to the operational phase)
i) CO 2 Emissions (restricted to the operational phase)
j) 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.).
Individual measures (like reduction of heat loss parameters) are awarded in almost all
sustainable building assessment systems 49 in order to focus on important optimisation
strategies and to ensure that besides the efficiency of HVAC systems (see next section) the
building itself meets defined quality requirements.
The authors try to avoid the rating of individual measures due to the complexity of regional
and local specifics and market availability of components but recommend the assessment of
the heating and cooling energy demand in addition to more comprehensive energy indicators
like delivered or primary energy demand which are based on these basic figures (see
sections b-e).
Because of the variety of calculation methods within the EU member states and the various
main indicators used for energy performance certificates, a more consistent method is
required for an EU Eco-label of buildings. Two options are possible:
49 (apart from DGNB which uses highly aggregated indicators such as primary energy non-renewable or CO2-
emissions over the whole life-cycle).
Final Report 79 31 03 2011