Mainstreaming
high-performance buildings could deliver a 124% return on investment
globally through building-related energy cost savings by 2050 says a new
comprehensive assessment study of the costs and benefits of low energy
building pathways published by the GBPN.
The new report “Monetary Benefits of Ambitious Building Energy Policies”
commissioned by the GBPN to the Central European University’s Center
for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy (3CSEP) and Advanced
Building and Urban Design (ABUD), offers a first attempt to quantify the
global and regional cost implications of ambitious scenarios for
implementing large-scale energy efficiency improvements in buildings.
Key Findings:
1° Shallow energy efficiency improvements do not pay-off in the
long run. The “Deep efficiency scenario” for buildings is the only
possible path to achieve R.O.I by 2050
By 2050, the “Deep efficiency scenario” is cost-effective for the
world, and for the four major regions covered by the report (EU-27, USA,
China and India). The analysis shows that the total cumulative energy
cost savings under the “Deep efficiency scenario” exceed the total
cumulative additional investment costs with a return on investment of
124% by 2050. With a more shallow set of building efficiency programs
under the “Moderate scenario”, the ROI is -6%. Hence, it is economically
much more efficient to promote the proliferation of very high
performance buildings rather than to focus on accelerated investment
into “shallow” energy efficiency improvements during the building
retrofit or construction. This is valid both for developed countries,
where the main construction activity focuses on retrofit of existing
buildings, and for emerging economies and developing countries, where
significant volumes of new buildings are added every year. In general
most opportunity for cost efficient energy savings was found in
residential buildings and in particular in single-family housing. This
is also the area where there is the largest experience with ultra low
energy construction and deep renovation as well as the largest
replicated experience so far.
2° Policy-Makers need to take a long-term view
The study proves that long-term cost analysis of building use
scenarios, despite all its uncertainties, is crucial in order to have a
comprehensive overview of the financial costs and benefits of
alternative pathways in the building sector. This is because buildings
have long lifespans, and the full benefit of advanced measures can only
be seen after several decades of the building's operation. Most of the
major regions reach cost-effectiveness between 2030-2040, i.e. beyond
the 2030 horizon, which is often used for analysis of energy savings
potential in buildings.
3° Energy prices and capacity building are key enablers of the deep efficiency scenario
If a low-energy building future becomes an important policy goal, its
economic efficiency can be best promoted by catalyzing fast and
effective technology learning (such as through demonstration projects,
well-targeted and designed investment subsidy schemes, etc.), as well as
eliminating the distortion of energy prices by subsidies.
4° More data and more research are needed
More data on deep renovation, integrated design and on costs is needed.
The report documents that experience with such high-performance
buildings and supporting policies is still too low especially in
emerging markets such as China and India (where most new construction
takes place) and there is a general lack of good data on costs for
integrated solutions. Most experience is found in adding elements to
existing buildings and this approach doesn't work for holistic design or
effective bioclimatic design. There is a need for large-scale
demonstration and comparative studies.
This study is a continuation of the GBPN’s Best-practices scenario analysis
(Ãœrge-Vorsatz et al. 2012b), and is also based on the 3CSEP HEB model
(Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy High Efficiency
Buildings Model), which was extended to include the Cost analysis
module. As with the previous study (Ãœrge-Vorsatz et al. 2012b), this
report is focused on the four key regions, including both developed
regions (EU-27, USA) as well as emerging economies (China, India). The
global costs and benefits for the two outlined scenarios are calculated
based on the aggregation of the results for the 11 regions, defined in
the Global Energy Assessment (Ãœrge-Vorsatz et al. 2011).
Diana Urge-Vorsatz, András Reith, KatarÃna Korytárová, Mónika Egyed, János Dollenstein: Monetary Benefits of Ambitious Building Energy Policies, January 2015.
Research report prepared by ABUD (Advanced Building and Urban Design) for the Global Building Performance Network (GBPN)