Patterns of Dwelling Types, Location, and Spaciousness of Living in Norway. Critical Remarks on the Practice of Measuring Energy Performance per Floor Area Only

Lillian Rokseth,Bendik Manum

doi:10.3390/buildings11090394

Abstract

For decades, energy efficiency has been a key issue in the Norwegian building sector, and energy standards are strict in order to reduce net delivered energy to buildings. Formally, requirements on energy use of dwellings are set by kWh per m2 heated GIA per year, a unit not accounting for dwelling size or number of persons in the households. This study, examining spaciousness of living in relation to dwelling types on an urban scale, shows that dwelling area per resident differs a lot across location and dwelling types. This implies that buildings formally performing the same in terms of following the legislation equally, in reality, may have a very different energy demand per person. When comparing dwelling types, energy demand per floor area and floor area per person is considerably higher for detached dwellings than for apartments. For both dwelling types, the energy demand of the dwellings in use is higher than what is stated in the requirements, and this difference is highest for detached houses. The current practice of measuring energy demand only per floor area is therefore insufficient. To realistically model energy performance of dwellings, measures accounting for dwelling size and number of residents should be included.

Highlights

Over a third of the energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale comes from the operation of buildings [1]
While our results focus on the implications of the total net energy requirements and statistics on specific energy use when these are calculated per person and where only operational energy is included, a study by Stephan and Crawford [36] shows that by accounting for embodied energy demand in addition to operational energy the difference in energy performance between dwelling types increases even more
This paper demonstrates that dwelling types differ considerably by floor area per person

Summary

Introduction

Over a third of the energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale comes from the operation of buildings [1]. A large body of research exists on the potential for energy savings in the residential building stock This literature focusses on thermal characteristics and consequent space heating demand, e.g., [4], as well as changing the behavioral patterns of occupiers [4,5,6]. More compact areas are found to be more energy efficient than more dispersed ones [7,8,9,10,11], and housing typology and the shape of the building is found to impact on thermal performance [12,13] Some of these studies have revealed that certain building characteristics affect the energy demand, such as the share of passive areas

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