Sustainable building energy efficiency retrofit for hotel buildings using EPC mechanism in China: Analytic Network Process (ANP) approach

Building Energy Efficiency Retrofit (BEER) is considered as a valuable way to improve energy efficiency of high-energy-consumption buildings. Sustainable BEER helps integrate sustainable development strategy into existing buildings and retrofit projects. To ensure BEER projects that can fulfill the sustainable development strategy, Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) is one possible market mechanism to deliver energy efficiency projects. Sustainable BEER under the EPC mechanism is a comprehensive system which involves the various demands of sustainable dimensions, performance criteria and groups of project success factors, making multi-criteria decisions become a challenging problem for decision makers. This paper aims to examine the interrelationships of sustainable BEER by focusing on an existing hotel building. EPC mechanism is applied in the case study and an effective Analytic Network Process (ANP) approach is also employed in the research. The result indicates that sustainable BEER in hotel buildings under the EPC mechanism is mainly determined by project control mechanism, available technology, organizing capacity of the team leader, trust, accurate Measurement and Verification (M&V), and team workers' technical skills. Decision makers should dedicate more attention to these aspects. From the research findings, several policy implications are proposed in this paper.