Track: Sustainability and Green Systems

Abstract

Since the global energy consumption is reaching unsustainable levels, the need for regulating energy consumptions has been highlighted. As revealed from literature, buildings consume approximately 50% of the global energy annually, during construction, operation, maintenance and deconstruction stages. Hence a variety of methods are followed to minimise the impacts of embodied energy (EE) and operational energy (OE) in buildings. EE impacts of buildings are becoming significant with the increased efficiency in OE consumption. Therefore, considering either EE or OE in its individuality is not a pragmatic approach. The design stage was identified as the most suitable stage for integrating energy efficiency measures, since most crucial project decisions are taken at this stage. Different professionals who can impact energy decisions were also identified. Although a multitude of research has been conducted on EE and OE individually, there seems a lack of investigations that focus on both these aspects together. Therefore, this paper sets out to develop a conceptual framework to optimise the impact of EE and OE in buildings during the design stage by reviewing secondary data. The involvement of construction professionals, barriers and strategies to optimise the impact of EE and OE are discussed and incorporated to the framework.