Energy and carbon performance of housing: upgrade analysis, energy labelling and national policy development

摘要

The area of policy formulation for the energy/carbon performance of housing is coming under increasing focus. A major challenge is to account for the large variation within national housing stocks relative to factors such as location, climate, age. construction, previous upgrades, appliance use and heating-tooling system types. Existing policy oriented tools rely on static calculation models that have limited ability to represent building behaviour and the impact of future changes in climate and technology. The switch to detailed simulation tools to address these limitations in the context of policy development has hitherto been focussed on the modelling of a small number of representative designs rather than dealing with the spread inherent in large housing stocks. To address these challenges, the ESRU Domestic Energy Model (EDEM) has been developed as a Web based tool built on detailed simulation models that have been aligned with the outcomes of national house condition surveys. On the basis of pragmatic inputs. EDEM is able to determine energy use and carbon emissions at any scale -from an individual dwelling to national housing stocks. The model was used at the behest of the Scottish Building Standards Agency and South Ayrshire Council to determine the impact of upgrades and the deployment of new and renewable energy systems. EDEM was also used to rate the energy /carbon performance of individual dwellings as required by the EU Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings (EU, 2002). This paper describes the EDEM methodology and presents the findings from applications at different scales.