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