Analyzing Impact Factors Of Building Energy Consumption: Modeling And Empirical Study

With the accelerated urbanization process and the improving of people's living standard, China's building energy consumption shows rigid growth trend. Under the promotion of industrialization, the level of energy efficiency of industrial sector goes up fast, while the energy conservation potential in industrial field declines. Therefore, the construction sector will bear increasingly important energy conservation and emission reduction tasks. Since China has put forward the task of emission reduction to decrease unit of GDP carbon emission by 40-45% till 2020, building energy efficiency turns out to be the key to accomplish this goal. Since huge scale city and country development are carried on in China recently and the fast increasing number of building area, it is time to push on the energy conservation in building. If we missed this chance, a lot of highly energy-consuming buildings will constantly consume big amount of energy for a long time after the urbanizing process, and China will have to spend huge money on the emission reduction because of the danger of“Carbon Lock-In”.Realizing the key factor of building energy consumption is good for government to find the fulcrum of developing energy conservation in building and define every impact degree on the building energy consumption caused by each elements. Currently, the main researches about factors of building energy consumption are focusing on the descriptive qualitative analysis, while quantitative researches are less. Under such background, this paper takes the factors of building energy consumption as the research object, trying to research the mechanism of action and influence degree of these factors effect on buildings by combining the qualitative and quantitative research method. On this basis, this paper will analyze the future increase of Chinese building energy consumption under different variation trend of each factor to provide references for the strategy of building energy conservation.The core of this paper include: calculation and analysis of building energy consumption, qualitative and quantitative research about the increase of building energy consumption, analysis of driving elements of building energy conservation and energy conservation contribution research, analysis of the situation of building energy consumption and policy research. Main conclusions are:?Building related energy consumption is the biggest consuming department in China. Basing from LCA method, the paper calculated and analyzed the macroscopic buildings life cycle energy consumption(MBEC). In 2009, MBEC is 1.2 billion tce, which is 41.4 percent of the amount of end energy consumption of China, and building has become the largest sector of energy consumption.?Five factors, population, urbanization, building area, consumption level and the development of tertiary-industry, play the key role in driving the increase of building energy consumption. Using STIRPAT model, the paper researched the driving factors of the building energy consumption(BEC) increase quantitatively and built the regression model for elements of BEC increase by ridge regression method. The research shows that the above five factors have driving effect on the increase of building energy consumption.?Technical and policy factors has played an important role in inhibiting BEC growing. Using LMDI approach, the paper researched the factors of the building energy efficiency quantitatively. The research shows that technical and policy factors have contributed to 23% of BEC growth rate of remission, the cumulative energy savings achieved 121 million tce.?It is required further policy efforts to increase building energy efficiency, to complete the 2020 carbon reduction targets. According to different trends of all factors, the paper launched a scenario analysis of BEC in 2020. According to China's carbon emission reduction targets in 2020, building energy efficiency targets were determined. Compared with BEC scenes and the targets, the paper found: if according to current policy efforts to promote energy efficiency in buildings will not be able to achieve energy saving targets by 2020; If the policy efforts to further strengthen and policy implementation goes well, will have opportunities over the target.Looking full text of the paper,there are several innovations.?A life cycle analysis of macroscopic building energy consumption model is been established. MBEC was divided into energy consumption of the building materials production, new buildings construction and existing buildings operation. By calculating and analyzing BEC in 1980-2009, the paper found: it is could reflect the status of all social BEC fully and objectively, by using LCA.?This paper use STIRPAT model firstly in reaserch on the driving factors of BEC. STIRPAT models are widely used in research on energy and environmental issues, domestic research is focus on energy consumption and carbon emissions of total national or industrial, on application of the method, there is few relevant literature on research driving factors of BEC, using IPAT model or STIRPAT model. This study obtained reasonable results.?This paper proposes a feasible way to measure the building energy conservation from the macroscopical level. Different from ordinary energy-using products, it is hard to judge the energy efficiency level of a building by using a definite and measurable single variable (such as the number of electricity consumed by a household appliance when it is working). Therefore, there is debate in the calculation of building energy conservation. Based on the LMDI method, this paper gives a feasible way to measure the building energy conservation from the macroscopical level and initially proposes concepts of comparable energy consumed by every building area and the building energy consumption index. Author also researches the influence degree caused by the behavior of residents using energy in a quantitative way.?A simple and valid way of scenario analyzing building energy consumption is been proposed. Based on factors model of buildings energy consuming, the scenario analysis proposed in this paper has follow characteristics: 1) Reasonable and feasible. Since there are many elements which can influence buildings energy consuming, the model considers key factors, population, urbanization, building area, life level and building energy consuming, etc, and eliminated many unimportant factors. 2) Simple form. The model shows the energy consumed by building as the product of few factors, which is easy to be understood. 3) Easy to calculate. Using EXCEL sheet can people forecast and calculate the scenario.