Incentives for energy efficient new buildings

Research, demonstration and meanwhile broader international experiences show that the new generation of buildings needs much less energy and by this contributes much less emissions to the environment. The most advanced are so called zero-energy buildings. The later must not be the target line, but about 50 kw/sqm buildings are almost standard meanwhile. This number has to be modified for extrem climate conditions to some extent.

The following measures summarize some maybe transferable experiences:

• Public awareness: It is exciting, that the great progress in energy efficient building technologies took its begin from the customer side mainly in Europe. Customers were confronted with steady increasing energy costs. All efforts to reduce this costs by changing the energy source from oil to electricity to district heating to natural gas to oil again, etc., which was offered by the energy industry, failed. The demand for more sustainable solutions including renewable energy sources prepared the way for a more holistic thinking. Today investment decisions for new buildings, in particular on private side, do more often than not consider not only the construction costs but also the whole lifetime costs of buildings, from which energy costs are a reasonable share.

• Competition: As better comfort and lower energy costs could not be answered with higher investments on consumer side, the construction industry was fostered to offer better quality at the almost same price. Within years only the squaremeter prices for low energy buildings tumbled down below the prices for conventional buildings. Industry identified with offering energy efficient buildings a new marketing strategy. These trend is completed by energy efficient household and office appliances.

• Regulations: European governments followed, were sometimes ahead of this development, and issued stronger and stronger minimum energy performance standards. An important further breakthrough is expected, because these standards are oriented increasingly at an energy indicator of the whole building (see energy accounting above) and not any longer at single facade elements or technical devices (eg. capacities of heating or cooling appliances). In particular municipalties play an important role, as they are responsible for building permissions and can check the plannings in advance.
• Substitution of fuels: A new building has to be permitted by the local authority. The permission procedure includes also the check of the impacts of the new building to the environment and neighbourhood. This gives the authority the occassion to influence the heating system to be used. Some fuels are prohibited meanwhile in Europe like heavy and medium oil. The trends go to natural gas, solar technologies and new bio-mass fuels. Some municipalities issued additional regulations under superior spatial planning considerations, what means that in selected districts new buildings have to be connected either to the district heating or to the natural gas system. In the minimum a central heating system must be established. Single devices are restricted mainly to solar or other renewable systems. These regulations are in some cases also applied for rehabilitated buildings (see above). The long tradition, that every household is free to decide about the energy source, is gone in advanced European countries meanwhile. On the other hand, buildings with no already installed heating devices are not sellable, because out of standard in many countries in Europe. To go back many decades, one will remember that the City of London could get under control the typical smog problem only with similar restrictive measures.
• Research and development: Some European countries have set up competitions of research and development projects with grants from government side. As an example the Austrian programm "Building of the future" is mentioned, because it is open also for non-Austrian applicants. Similar programmes would make sense focusing on integrated planning of buildings.
• Effects: Focusing on new buildings will enable a municipality to start a number of innovations on concrete project level and attract investments.

• Obstacles to be aware: You should be aware of resistance from industry, which perhaps does not want to change offers and marketing strategy and will argument with economic restrictions. You should be aware of resistance from consumers, who want to keep their freedom to decide on fuels by themself. Demonstration projects, good examples, consequent public awareness campaigns, as appropriate stronger regulations and strong enforcment, competition and serious information provision will help out of these problems.