Abstract
Cutting energy use in housing will play a key role in the UK’s efforts to reduce climate change emissions in line with international commitments. Much UK Government policy is based on modelling present and future emissions using assumptions from SAP, the Standard Assessment Procedure. This paper compares SAP-based modelling against measured gas consumption in 405 dwellings that were monitored in the Energy Follow-Up Survey, an extension of the English Housing Survey. The combined EFUS/EHS provides comprehensive information about space heating energy use for a sample of dwellings: detailed physical data, user behaviour, and measured energy use. Very poor model versus measurement agreement is observed at the individual dwelling level – the average difference is 45%. Much better agreement is observed when applying typical EFUS regimes of 20°C mean demand temperature, 10 hours of heating a day for weekdays and weekends, and a heating season of six months, and comparing average results. Comparisons for the 405 dwellings and an EFUS subset of 1,191 dwellings are both in agreement to within 2%, whilst average 2010 and 2011 sub-national estimates are in agreement to 3% of DUKES figures. The authors recommend changing SAP heating regimes to a mean demand temperature of 20°C, 10 hours of heating a day for weekdays and weekends, and a heating season of six months.
Highlights
The UK Climate Change Act requires the UK to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050, against base year 1990 values [1]
In 2012 household energy accounted for 29% of total UK energy consumption [2] so reductions in domestic energy use will play a major role in meeting targets
The Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) method is a standard approach for calculating the energy performance of individual dwellings [18] and is not intended for assessing national household energy use; the SAP algorithms are a substantial simplification of the actual building physics; the model uses the 16,670 dwellings from the English Housing Survey [19] to represent the housing stock; average monthly, regional climate data is used
Summary
The UK Climate Change Act requires the UK to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050, against base year 1990 values [1]. The SAP method is a standard approach for calculating the energy performance of individual dwellings [18] and is not intended for assessing national household energy use; the SAP algorithms are a substantial simplification of the actual building physics; the model uses the 16,670 dwellings from the English Housing Survey [19] to represent the housing stock; average monthly, regional climate data is used. By modifying the CHM to include heating regimes for individual dwellings, and considering only dwellings with full heating data, a more complete model versus measurement comparison was feasible This enabled a fuller investigation of the performance of the CHM and SAP in predicting energy use for heating, and a calibration of the default model heating behaviour assumptions. The paper concludes with a comparison of the modelled and measured values for space heating energy use, at both individual dwelling and aggregate levels
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