Strategies For Sustainable and Energy Efficient Buildings

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Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) from built environments include 12% of direct emissions attributed to the building sector and another 5% attributed to the electricity used by buildings. Thus, it is important to reduce these emissions in buildings in order to have more affordable and higher efficiency buildings. Retrofit is a primary strategy for reducing energy consumption in existing buildings and add value to the housing sector. Canada has an enormous building stock that was constructed before the advent of energy efficiency policies, particularly in the 1970s, 60s, 50s and earlier. This has spawned the building energy-retrofitting industry, which represents a significant economic opportunity for the Canadian housing sector. Consequently, there is a need for research support to enhance the energy and moisture performance of buildings. One of the main challenges of retrofits is an assessment of the condensation potential inside the building envelopes that may result in moisture-related problems. Despite progress to date, much effort is still needed to make buildings energy-efficient and to identify the most cost-effective retrofitting strategy. With the lack of this misunderstanding on how to efficiently and safely retrofit buildings and to support ongoing efforts in Canada to reduce GHG and energy use, it is proposed to look at developing cost-effective strategies retrofit for buildings that lead to zero energy and durable buildings, hence this proposed research program. It will focus on the energy and moisture performance of buildings. This will be done through laboratory testing, modeling and field monitoring to asses their energy and moisture performance. This proposed research program is needed to provide the scientific data and analysis necessary to characterize and improve the energy and moisture performance of existing buildings. The coupled numerical model developed in the research program for simultaneously assessing energy, indoor air quality (IAQ) and moisture performance will be benchmarked with the appropriate set of experimental data to capture the best performance of the whole building. With this model, the dynamic interactions between building envelope, IAQ, moisture loads, etc. will be significantly improved. The parametric study will follow in order to develop a user-friendly predictive and optimized design tool to be used by construction industry and researchers to assess the overall performance toward reducing building operating loads and thus the demand for energy over time. The proposed research program is intended to advance building design through the development of energy-efficient buildings towards zero energy. Its overarching goal is to effectively reduce energy use and GHG, and thus the environmental footprint of existing buildings. Lessons learned through this process would have positive impacts on new construction.