Understand the performance gap of your office

Though Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) provides the idea of how your dwelling's energy performance based on your building design, it is noted that the estimated result is always different from the actual energy consumption while everything is operating.

Therefore, a benchmarking tool CarbonBuzz is developed to identify the performance gap between the design and operation phase.

For more information, please visit the following website:

http://www.carbonbuzz.org/

Energy Benchmarking for Hong Kong Office Tenants

Most of the existing building energy benchmarking tools use the total energy consumption of the entire building (landlord + tenant part) for benchmarking. However, if the building got a bad benchmarking result, it is hard to know whether the landlord or the tenant has to bear more responsibility for improving the energy performance. Therefore, it is worth to have a benchmarking systems to differentiate the energy performance of tenant and the landlord part (of course, it is always better if we could know the performance of individual building system, e.g. lighting, air-conditioning.... as well, but it is still very difficult to develop such system due to data availability.).

Hong Kong Green Building Council (HKGBC) therefore developed a benchmarking tool specifically for office tenants, so as to let them understand what their energy performance is and provide them initial saving potential suggestions. There are 2 parts of the system, a simple (free) and a more sophisticated tool. For more information, you can refer to the following website: http://bestoo.hkgbc.org.hk/greenbuilding/index.aspx

Difference when learning energy in East and West

Probably the heading is little bit misleading and not always true, but I would like to discuss briefly here the difference between learning in East (hot climate) and West (cold climate), especially for commercial buildings.

Before starting the discussion, probably we should look at the energy / electricity consumption of a typical commercial building in HK (hot) and UK (cold) first.

Fig. 1 Average energy use in UK office (source from CarbonTrust) 

Fig. 2 Commercial Energy End-uses in HK commercial buildings in 2011 (source: EMSD, HKSAR Government)

You can note that space heating and air condition accounts for a large portion of the energy end-uses consumption. Therefore, energy consumption by air conditioning is a big topic when studying building energy (esp lighting is already quite efficient nowadays, many new commercial buildings started to install T5 light tubes or even LED)

So what is the difference? I will show you 2 examples.

Building Facade 
Studies showed that curtain walls would bring energy savings to cold climate countries due to bring heat and light to the building but cause the buildings in warm countries to consume more energy (the benefit of having daylight into the building is not enough to cover the energy used for air conditioning load).

Fig. 3 a curtain wall building in Frankfurt

Occupant Behaviour 
The unit Clo means the thermal insulation provided by clothing. The higher the Clo it is, the warmer you will be. In warm countries, you may need to wear low Clo clothes, but vice versa in cold countries.

Fig. 4 a fashion design (for office wear) award show organized by HKGBC and Clo is one of the judging criteria, so the designers need to design clothes with low Clo

Hong Kong Energy End-use Data 2013 - Energy consumption by buildings keep rising!!!

In September of every year, the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department (EMSD) would publish a report on the Hong Kong Energy End-use and it shows the city's energy consumption of 2 years ago (i.e. for the 2013 report, it kept the 2011 energy consumption record).

It is interesting to see that the portion of electricity consumption by buildings kept rising (92% of the citywide electricity consumption!!!) and let's do a quick overview of the statistics of this year. =)

(source: EMSD - HKSAR Government)

• The energy consumption of the whole city kept rising for 4 consecutive years and it is highest among these 10 years (278 618 TJ)
• Buildings consume for 92% of the total electricity used, while it is only 86% in 2001. 
• Even for the total energy use (including other use of fossil fuels), buildings in HK consumes 63% of the total energy use, while it is 54% in 2001. 

As Hong Kong is a city without much industrial activities, it is easy to understand that why buildings take such a large portion of energy in the city. But it is unforgivable that the energy consumption kept rising, while every city worldwide is emphasizing "sustainable development". 

Though you may argue that the Building Energy Efficiency Ordinance (BEEO) is just being enforced from 21 September 2012 and BEAM Plus (the building environment assessment system, just like LEED) is getting more popular over the years, the energy consumption will drop starting from 2012 or 2013. However, as BEEO only asks owners to provide their energy data but not setting a target for them and it is only the BEAM Plus for new buildings getting popular due to the GFA concession policy, I really doubted that whether the dream of having the energy consumption dropping will happen shortly. 

Probably, the HK Government should follow 

• Singapore - to set up a sustainable blueprint and strict targets of energy reduction
• Japan - to implement a comprehensive system, the Cap-and-Trade policy, for the buildings. 

For the whole report, please visit the following website: http://www.emsd.gov.hk/emsd/e_download/pee/HKEEUD2013.pdf

(too busy at the moment, probably will do a more detail introduction for worldwide policies and analysis in the future =) ) 

10 reasons for why I study Energy Demand

1. Energy is a trendy stuff
2. I don't like chemistry (hard for me to study topics about energy supply). 
3. Building consumes over 90% of electricity in my city
4. I can probably get a good job in related area
5. I studied engineering for my undergraduate
6. If other uses less, I can use more 
7. I like working in front of the computer and doing data analysis stuff
8. The word "sustainability" sounds cool
9. I like this subject
10. I really like this subject. 

Office Building in Cologne!!!

It is so nice!!! Wish I have a chance to work there.... (though the energy performance is not known...haha) 

Something about me - Robot to Environment

(Source: South China Morning Post - Left; Singtao Daily - Right)

An old news clipping (Singtao Daily - 11/7/2008) - http://std.stheadline.com/archive/fullstory.asp?andor=or&year1=2008&month1=07&day1=11&year2=2008&month2=07&day2=11&category=all&id=20080711m01&keyword1=&keyword2=

Building Energy Benchmarking 101 - What is Energy Benchmarking?

What is Energy Benchmarking 

 It is to compare the Energy Use Index, i.e. energy used per floor area, of different buildings fairly by

• Categorization   – Grouping the similar types of buildings together
• Normalization   – minimize the objective impacts(weather,   occupancy) on the building’s energy use
• Separation     – excluding the special energy use in the buildings   (e.g. sever rooms)

What information it provides

Benchmarking systems usually tell you what your building's energy performance is, and probably some additional information as well. Take Display Energy Certificate (DEC) (UK) as an example: 

(picture source: https://www.gov.uk/)