Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
• Building design: Broadly speaking, the studies might be classified as dealing
with building design and renovation, energy demand estimation in the built
environment, urban climate as it directly affects buildings, urban planning and
policy, and transport. They represent a range of spatial scales, from single
buildings to groups of buildings in a street or district or the whole city, and the
behaviour of individuals.
• Urban climate: The studies operated at two main spatial scales. The first group
looked at the effect of urban climate and heat island effects on buildings and the
second looked at a larger district scale, including street cross sections or raster
grid of several hundred metres.
• System design: These studies are characterized primarily by their use of opti-
mization techniques. The typical problem definition in these studies is, for an
exogenously specified pattern of energy service demands, to determine the
combinations of capital equipment and operating patterns to meet some
objective subject to constraints (e.g. what is the lowest cost system that satisfies
heat and power demands subject to a carbon emissions reduction target?).
• Policy assessment: This cluster representing studies of the whole city and how
its energy performance might be shaped by policy decisions.
• Transportation and land use: Within this field of transportation and land-use
research, integrated land-use-transport models are most relevant. These are large
complex, generally econometric, model systems which seek to capture the major
dynamics of urban processes such as land-use change and transportation use.
Almost one-third of energy is attributed to the production of materials and
goods in industry (Cullen and Allwood
2010
). Allwood et al. (
2010
) analysed
options for reducing energy use in material production (improving material effi-
ciency through substituting less energy-intensive materials, light-weighting prod-
ucts, designing for reuse and recycling, etc.).
Nakicenovic et al. (
1993
) introduce the term ''service efficiency'', defined as
''the provision of a given task with less useful energy (the output from conversion
devices) without loss of 'service' quality''. The effect is to separate out efficiency
measures, for example using a more fuel-efficient car, from conservation measures,
such as improving the flow of traffic (Nakicenovic et al.
1993
).
Hence, life cycle efficiency of energy-efficient built environment depends to a
very great extent not only on the selected most rational processes and solutions, the
interest level of the concerned parties involved in the project, expressed as the
effectiveness of their participation in the process, but also on the micro-, meso- and
macro-level factors. As can be seen from Fig.
3
, the object of investigation is
rather complicated involving not only life cycle of energy-efficient built envi-
ronment and its stages but also including stakeholders and micro- and macro-
environment factors having impact on the former. To select a rational alternative, a
new model of a complex analysis of life cycle of energy-efficient built environ-
ment was developed. Based on this model, professionals involved in design and
realization of life cycle of energy-efficient built environment can develop a lot of
the alternative versions as well as assessing them and making the final choice
