A Carbon Footprint of an Office Building

Energies

Miimu Airaksinen¹ 

[1] VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, P.O. Box 1000, FI-02044 VTT, Finland

关键词: energy efficiency;    CO₂ emissions from energy use and materials;    primary energy;   

DOI  :  10.3390/en4081197

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Current office buildings are becoming more and more energy efficient. In particular the importance of heating is decreasing, but the share of electricity use is increasing. When the CO₂ equivalent emissions are considered, the CO₂ emissions from embodied energy make up an important share of the total, indicating that the building materials have a high importance which is often ignored when only the energy efficiency of running the building is considered. This paper studies a new office building in design phase and offers different alternatives to influence building energy consumption, CO₂ equivalent emissions from embodied energy from building materials and CO₂ equivalent emissions from energy use and how their relationships should be treated. In addition this paper studies how we should weight the primary energy use and the CO₂ equivalent emissions of different design options. The results showed that the reduction of energy use reduces both the primary energy use and CO₂ equivalent emissions. Especially the reduction of electricity use has a high importance for both primary energy use and CO₂ emissions when fossil fuels are used. The lowest CO₂ equivalent emissions were achieved when bio-based, renewable energies or nuclear power was used to supply energy for the office building. Evidently then the share of CO₂ equivalent emissions from the embodied energy of building materials and products became the dominant source of CO₂ equivalent emissions. The lowest primary energy was achieved when bio-based local heating or renewable energies, in addition to district cooling, were used. The highest primary energy was for the nuclear power option.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2011 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.