Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Building Energy Performance: Analyses Based on Techno-Economic Models

Abstract

Energy assessment in the built environment has been used widely to assist with decision-making with respect to environmental design and retrofitting tasks. Envelope performance, which is determined by collecting energy insulation information in the existing buildings (e.g., U-value and OTTV), can greatly contribute to facilitating understanding of overall energy potentials. In this thesis, questions regarding energy conservation in building envelopes and their policy implications are resolved by applying novel techno-economic models. With the assistance of tools such as in-situ monitoring, econometrics, machine learning and epidemiology, the study covers a wide range of cases from individual buildings, community-scale buildings and city-level building stock. This research design allows for further suggestions to be made on multi-dimensional evaluation as well as some discussion of the topic of envelope energy performance.

Three research projects have been designed and implemented to assess building energy performance within different dimensions and across different research scales. The first project examines actual individual building cases in cool, warm and hot climates by conducting three designed in-situ monitoring campaigns in Cambridge, Hong Kong and Shanghai, respectively. The impact of a potentially warming climate in the future has also been evaluated, which shows the different directions with respect to policy amendments for the three regions. The second community-scale research project aims at helping estate owners and local governments in making decisions with respect to operations and future property development. Therefore, the research examines how the spatial features of buildings affect their electricity consumption by using a uniquely constructed data set of residential spaces in 1528 public buildings in Hong Kong. This part of the study fills a gap in the literature on the nexus between structural features and energy use based on large-scale building studies. Nevertheless, government policy and legislation still need to be reviewed, and more effective suggestions can only be made with larger-scale datasets. With this purpose in mind, the third project was executed, which involves a unique database reflecting the energy consumption of residential and commercial buildings in Hong Kong, including 39,092 buildings erected from 1982 to 2016. Noticeable contributions to total building energy savings could be found from historical OTTV legislations advanced by 2016, which is an important development in support of the “HK3030” energy target.

Date of Award	5 Aug 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Lin ZHANG (Supervisor) & Ian Alexander RIDLEY (External Co-Supervisor)