Modeling and simulation of a building towards energy efficiency

Abstract

Residential buildings are the significant energy consumer of the India which is about 24% of the total energy consumption. Energy efficient buildings are the ideal solution to reduce energy consumption in the building sector. The energy efficient buildings can be achieved by incorporating passive features or renewable energy systems or both. The current work aims to perform a retrofitting analysis of an existing building into an energy efficient building. For performing the energy analysis REVIT 2017 tool is used. Using the REVIT 2017 tool building model is developed, building information are loaded and energy analyses are performed. The building is analyzed as two cases. The first case is to estimate energy performance of the existing building. The second case is to incorporate passive features and renewable energy system to the building and evaluate the energy performance. Existing building Energy Usage Intensity (EUI) was 193 kWh/m2 /year. When passive features (Insulation, additional window glazing and efficient air conditioning systems) alone incorporated to the building the building EUI is reduced to 138 kWh/m2 /year. Along with Passive features Photovoltaic modules with different efficiencies 16%, 18% and 20% are considered for renewable energy generation. The energy generation for the different PV modules for three different roof area (40%, 60% and 70% of total roof area) is evaluated. The energy usage intensity varies from 11.4 from-150 kWh/m2 /year for the combination of different efficiency of PV module and the different % of roof area covered. The negative sign indicates the energy generation after the required energy usage. The payback period for only incorporating passive features is 6.3 years and while incorporating PV system with passive features is 9 years.