Establishment of Key Performance Indicators for Green Building Operations Monitoring—An Application to China Case Study

Jinqiu Li,Qingqin Wang,Hao Zhou

doi:10.3390/en13040976

Abstract

Released green building evaluation standards for operation stage include a huge number of indicators, which are very comprehensive and systematic. However, the indicators of these standards are very complicated and a large amount of time and manpower are consumed for their evaluation. To evaluate the operational performance of green buildings more practically and efficiently, some studies collect the operational data for part of the indicators (mainly focusing on building energy performance, indoor environmental quality or occupant satisfaction), which are too rough to evaluate the performance of green building. This paper proposed a total of 27 key performance indicators (KPIs) for green building operations monitoring. The number of proposed indicators is much fewer than the evaluation standards, as well as suitable for long-term monitoring, which can dramatically reduce evaluation time and cost. On the other hand, the indicators involving Outdoor environmental quality, Indoor environmental quality, HVAC system, P&D system, Renewable energy system, Total resource consumption and User behavior, which are more comprehensive and systematic than the conventional monitoring studies for operational performance of green building. Firstly, an indicators library for operations monitoring of green building was established based on relevant standards and literature review in this field. Secondly, “SMART” principle and Delphi method were adopted to select the key performance indicators for green building operations monitoring. Different background experts regarding green building industry were chosen to screen the most relevant, accessible and measurable indicators. Subsequently, two projects in China were selected for case study of key performance indicators proposed in this paper for green building operations monitoring to validate the feasibility and advancement.

Highlights

Green buildings, which are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient, have witnessed tremendous growth in these years [1,2]
This paper aims to propose a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for green building operations monitoring, that is more practical and efficient than the evaluation standards, and more comprehensive and systematic than the conventional monitoring studies for operational performance of green building
Two projects in China were selected for case study of key performance indicators for green building operations monitoring to validate the feasibility and advancement

Summary

Introduction

Green buildings, which are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient, have witnessed tremendous growth in these years [1,2]. In spite of the rapid development of green buildings worldwide, more and more researchers have found that numerous green buildings underperform compared with their design phase specifications. Newsham et al [3] found that 28%–35% of the buildings with LEED certification showed more energy consumption than non-green buildings. Research by Scofield reported that the buildings with LEED certification did not save energy compared with their conventional. Davies et al [5] concluded that the indoor environmental qualities of certain green buildings in the UK were below expectations. To explore the performance gap, it is necessary to conduct green building data collection of operational performance.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion