Buildings consume almost 40% of all electricity. That is a cause for concern as well as an opportunity to leverage.
What if we are able to bring in significant efficiencies to the way buildings use energy and are able to bring down their energy use significantly without sacrificing comfort? That could result in significant CO2 emissions reduction.
Typically, HVAC constitutes about 40% of a building’s total energy consumption, with 10% from lighting, and about 20% from appliances and equipment such as water heaters, freezers, cloth washers & dryers etc. Such a consumption profile helps solution providers to target key segments such as HVAC for effective savings on energy consumption and high return on investments for the owners of the building.
Some energy efficiency solutions such as efficient air conditioners are fairly well developed, while some others such as the use of digital technologies for monitoring and controlling energy use have evolved quite rapidly during the last few years. A few others, especially energy efficient building heating solutions, are seeing significant innovations especially in countries such as the UK and others in Europe with substantial space heating requirements.
Apart from its decarbonization potential, building energy efficiency measures also provide attractive returns on investment for the building owners, creating a win-win for all stakeholders.
Solution-specific challenges exist - radiant cooling solutions, for instance, might need significant changes to the building infrastructure. Challenges also exist in terms of level of awareness of some effective solutions and the high upfront costs
Innovations during the 2020-2030 period are likely to happen around the use of IoT for monitoring and control, use of AI/Big Data for building customized applications, material and equipment innovations in thermal storage.
Buildings consume almost 40% of all electricity. As global electricity generation emits about 35% of total CO2 emissions, or about 12 billion tons, energy use for buildings alone emits close to about 5 billion tons of CO2 annually.
Just a 10% reduction in building energy consumption owing to increased efficiency, can save about 500 million tons of CO2 emissions per year. Need we say more for the decarbonization potential of building energy efficiency?
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