Building Energy Conservation Strategies Evaluation and Simulation

Abstract

From the view of life cycle, the energy consumption and CO2 emission of office buildings are found to mainly occur during the operation and maintenance stages and can be up to 80%. Furthermore, building design factors such as orientation, window glass types, window to wall ratio, building envelope insulation, sunshade device, air conditioner temperature, and illumination control all have significant impacts on the energy consumption of the office buildings. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate the efficacy of energy conservation strategies for office buildings in Taiwan. An existing office building in Taichung is used as a case study and energy conservation strategies are simulated and evaluated by Energy Plus model. It is found that the building investigated in this study can save up to 20% annual energy consumption by implementing suitable energy conservation strategies into the existing system.