Developing a catalogue of replicable designs for energy efficient residential buildings

• 27 April, 2020
• National Blogs

Sustainability has become a design challenge with the country’s buildings sector expected to increase five-fold from 2015 to 2050. India has a tremendous opportunity to upturn the energy efficiency potential for its growing building sector, simply by incorporating energy-efficient features and capturing the value of energy savings in its buildings. The energy efficient technologies and sustainable solutions can not only provide us with widespread economic benefits having less impact on the quality of our living surroundings but also improves the sense of our well-being.

The current policy environment is beginning to promote energy efficiency and the execution of national and state level programs will be the key determinants of its success. India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (2008) points to building efficiency measures as essential to carbon emission reduction. The Ministry of Power and Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) are entrusted with the task of implementation for the National Mission on Enhanced Energy Efficiency (NMEEE) under National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC).

Bureau of Energy Efficiency with the support of GIZ are working on a multiple projects in order to bring about a transformation of the Residential Building Design approach. One of the projects is to develop a Catalogue of Replicable Designs for Energy Efficient Residential Buildings to promote low energy structures, materials and market transformation. The project will target the habitations that are yet to be constructed and ensure compliance with the best practices. Thereby providing a platform with a database on sustainable building design in a user friendly format and a wide reach.

The development of these Design Templates for energy efficient residences, will take into consideration - Different Residential Typologies, Sizes of Dwelling Units across Five Different Climatic Zones of India. The idea is to ensure that the user is able to adopt these energy efficiency measures into the design process so as to set an example that goes beyond the existing standards. The inputs in the catalogue will focus on elements of the building that impact the overall energy performance.

Recognizing the fact that residential buildings that are built today would progressively move towards room air-conditioning, the catalogue would recommend additive improvement measures such as additional insulation, suitable ventilation systems, high-performance windows, air-tightness of the building fabric etc. Eventually, all the database of design options with cost details, energy performance parameters would be made available to the user in a consolidated and readable format in the form of a web-based tool with simplified user interface. The tool would be made available on the EcoNiwas Portal for assisting the user in taking an informed decision with efficient building design measures.

“Energy efficiency is not just about saving energy, it’s about tackling economic, environmental and social issues at the same time” - Harry Verhaar, Head of Global Public & Government Affairs for Philips Lighting.

Kirti Bali

Technical Consultant, GIZ