Documenting the energy savings potential in India’s residential buildings

A new report entitled Residential Buildings in India: Energy Use Projections and Savings Potentials by the Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN) and jointly developed with CEPT University from India provides the first comprehensive attempt to document energy saving potentials that could be achieved in India by 2050 in the residential sector. Four energy scenarios were developed to identify the potential energy savings, each relating to a level of ambition of building performance policies and market efforts.

This study provides decision makers with recommendations about future actions to achieve deep energy savings from the residential building sector while generating a wide range of positive economic, environmental and social opportunities.

The report investigates four possible residential electricity consumption projections up to 2050 compared to today’s levels: business-as-usual, moderate, aggressive and very aggressive. The study specifically focuses on assessing the role of the building envelopes in relation to comfort air conditioning systems and appliances in order to ensure energy efficient dwellings for urban and rural residential sectors. Under the business-as-usual scenario, electricity consumption could rise by more than eight times by 2050 compared to 2012 levels. However, using focused policy and market efforts, the moderate, aggressive, and very aggressive strategies can respectively limit the consumption increases to five times, four times and three times the current energy use, which would represent relative energy savings of 27%, 44%, and 57% compared to business-as-usual.

To achieve the potentials, the report identifies the following recommendations for action:

• Better Data: Introduction of a residential baseline energy data programme using a large survey to provide a detailed picture of current residential energy consumption patterns;
• Policy Roadmaps: Elaboration of policy roadmaps that can support the implementation of energy efficiency measures for residential buildings; and
• Residential Building Energy Code: Development of a specific code focussing on residential building envelope efficiency adapted to the different climate zones to realise the saving potentials of all building envelope components to address the rising demand for thermal comfort.

Information on the report is available from the GBPN website.