Energy use of subtropical high-rise public residential buildings and impacts of energy saving measures

Abstract

The rapid growth of energy consumption in buildings has become an alarming threat to the climate. Various building-level energy saving measures have been studied and adopted to achieve energy efficiency. However, high-rise public residential buildings in subtropical climate as an important contributor to building-level energy consumption have received insufficient attention of research. The aim of this paper is to analyse the energy use of high-rise residential buildings in subtropical climate and examine the impacts of different energy saving measures for developing strategies for achieving very low-energy high-rise buildings. A typical high-rise (40-storey) public residential building in Hong Kong was selected as the case building, which has the energy use intensity of 106.6 kWh/m2 for the total building area and of 153.8 kWh/m2 for the area inside the residential units. The energy model of the case building developed using EnergyPlus software was carefully calibrated using metered energy use data and expert consultations adopting a systematic approach. Sensitivity analyses were then conducted using the parametric analysis tool jEPlus to quantify the impacts of different energy saving measures on energy use intensity reduction. It was found the measures in relation to human behaviours have the largest impact, followed by building service system efficiency and renewable energy. Building form and building envelope have the modest impact. The findings enhance the knowledge of subtropical high-rise public residential buildings’ energy performance, and the developed and calibrated energy model could be used to explore more strategic energy saving measures in the long term. The quantified impacts of the measures should inform design decisions of low-energy housing production in high-rise sectors.