A Carbon Footprint of an Office Building

Abstract

Current office buildings are becoming more and more energy efficient. In particular the importance of heating is decreasing, but the share of electricity use is increasing. When the CO 2 equivalent emissions are considered, the CO 2 emissions from embodied energy make up an important share of the total, indicating that the building materials have a high importance which is often ignored when only the energy efficiency of running the building is considered. This paper studies a new office building in design phase and offers different alternatives to influence building energy consumption, CO 2 equivalent emissions from embodied energy from building materials and CO 2 equivalent emissions from energy use and how their relationships should be treated. In addition this paper studies how we should weight the primary energy use and the CO 2 equivalent emissions of different design options. The results showed that the reduction of energy use reduces both the primary energy use and CO 2 equivalent emissions. Especially the reduction of electricity use has a high importance for both primary energy use and CO 2 emissions when fossil fuels are used. The lowest CO 2 equivalent emissions were achieved when bio-based, renewable energies or nuclear power was used to supply energy for the office building. Evidently then the share of CO 2 equivalent emissions from the embodied energy of building materials and products became the dominant source of CO 2 equivalent emissions. The lowest primary energy was achieved when bio-based local heating or renewable energies, in addition to district cooling, were used. The highest primary energy was for the nuclear power option. OPEN ACCESSEnergies 2011, 4 1198 Keywords: energy efficiency; CO 2 emissions from energy use and materials; primary energy

Carbon and Energy Footprints of Prefabricated Industrial Buildings: A Systematic Life Cycle Assessment Analysis

“…The energy footprint is 602.1 kWh/m 3 (138.2 kWh/m 3 without the use phase), and it shows the same behavior (649.5 to 556.8 kWh/m 3 ). The use phase represents 75.11% of the total CF (77.28% of EF), in agreement with literature results [11,24]; the plant production phase represents 25.56% of the total CF (23.03% of EF).…”

“…It is estimated that up to 60% of the overall raw materials extracted from the Earth is consumed by this sector, and that consequently roughly 50% of the green-house gas (GHG) emissions in the atmosphere is attributable to their transformation into construction materials [8]. In this context, the analysis of lifecycle-based assessments on the main impact categories associated to the pre-production, production, assembly, use, and end-of-life phases represents a strategic asset towards a holistic interpretation of the footprint from industrial buildings [9], and to guide the design phase towards the most energy and environmentally efficient option [10,11].…”

The use of multi-criteria optimization to choose solutions for energy-efficient buildings

“…Following the description of the factors influencing the energy-related evaluation of the building they are listed as follows: C 1 -an energy criterion, (PE), C 2 -environmental criterion, (CO 2 ), C 3 -economy criterion, (C G ) and C 4 -investment costs return criterion, (∆C in, inv ) [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. The goal of the method is to choose the compromise solution from all available solutions (equation 1)…”

A DFuzzy-DAHP Decision-Making Model for Evaluating Energy-Saving Design Strategies for Residential Buildings

“…Numerous factors are involved when considering energy-saving designs, particularly for large-scale carbon-neutral community building developments; examples include the use of renewable energies [31], eco-designs [32], solar energy [33][34][35], lighting [36], compressed shopper waste (CSW) blocks [37], waste disposal [8], air-conditioning facilities [38], ventilation designs [39,40], shading designs [41], heating systems [42,43], green roofs [44], building envelopes [45], and wall insulation for buildings and double-skin facades [46][47][48]. Therefore, comprehensive preparation in integration and design is required to demonstrate effectiveness.…”