Insight in actual energy use in houses as a basis for energy performance contracting

Insight in actual energy use in houses as a basis for energy performance contracting

Visscher, H.J.

Architecture and The Built Environment

OTB research for the Built Environment

2014-12-31

Energy performance contracting is based on the idea that the investments for the improvements of the energy performance of a building through better insulation and more efficient installations will be covered by the savings of the use of energy in the use phase. The external contractor takes care of all the investments costs and guarantees the owner a fixed energy bill and hopes to profit from it. An interesting concept that is widely advocated as a solution to deal with some problems that mostly obstruct energy efficiency renovations. In the EPC approach the owner does not have to invest and does not take any risk. Still, at least in the Netherlands, it is not often used in practice and there are indeed some preconditions for projects that have to be met to make the approach work. The most important precondition is that the actual energy savings in practise will be enough to cover the investments with a reasonable payback time. This paper presents some results of research projects that compared the expected energy savings according to the energy performance calculation tools with the actual energy use in practice. The results of these projects show a large discrepancy between expected and real energy use caused by various reasons: design and construction failures and the influence of behaviour. It appeared that in the houses with a bad energy performance the behaviour led to far less energy use that expected and in the houses with a very good energy performance to a higher energy use because of rebound effects. What does this mean for energy performance contracting?

Actual energy use
Energy efficiency
Houses
Energy performance contracts

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:29821032-4a56-446a-b424-2b5243ffadf7

Hong Kong Green Building Council

HKIPM 2014 Conference, Novel Project Delivery Systems - Current Status and The Way Forward, 25 April 2014, Hong Kong, China

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2014 Visscher, H.J.