TABLE OF CONTENTS - The Professional Green Building Council

Theme B: Creating a livable, healthy and environmentally viable cities______________________________________________________CityCDD w (kl/m²)______________________________________________________Canberra 80 0.72Melbourne 100 0.70Adelaide 132 0.70Perth 340 0.61Sydney 541 1.13Brisbane 1043 1.56______________________________________________________The indication from the data therefore is that there is a strong relationship betweenclimate and water use. This logically can be accounted for by the waterconsumption of cooling towers. In this context it is noted that the use of irrigationin the sample buildings was very limited owing to the central city location of thevast majority of the sample. Most buildings within the sample used cooling towersfor heat rejection (109 samples). By contrast, the average water consumption ofbuildings without cooling towers showed no relationship with climate.(r²=0.002).Statistical assessment of the significance of the difference between water-cooledand air-cooled buildings was inconclusive at 95% certainty. This appeared to bemainly due to the relatively small number of air-cooled buildings in the sample andthe high variance in the data generally. Inspection of the data suggests howeverthat a larger sample might reveal statistical significance. Other potentially causalfactors showed little or no difference in sub-sample medians and certainly nostatistical significance.The data are plotted against climate in Figure 1. In the figure, a number of featurescan be seen. Firstly, the general increasing trend in warmer climates is evident.Furthermore, there is good evidence that the variance of the consumption increasesas the median of the consumption increases. This is an important feature of the169