Abstract
Traditionally, the Finnish legislation have focused on energy use and
especially on energy used for heating space in buildings. However, in
many cases this does not lead to the optimal concept in respect to
minimizing green house gases. This paper studies how CO2
emission levels are affected by different measures to reduce energy use
in buildings. This paper presents two real apartment buildings with
different options of energy efficiency and power sources. The
calculations clearly show that in the future electricity and domestic
hot water use will have high importance in respect to energy efficiency,
and therefore also CO2 equivalent (eq) emissions. The
importance increases when the energy efficiency of the building
increases. There are big differences between average Finnish production
and individual power plants; CO2 eq emissions might nearly
double depending on the energy source and the power plant type. Both a
building with an efficient district heating as a power source, and a
building with ground heat in addition to nuclear power electricity as a
complimentary electricity source performed very similarly to each other
in respect to CO2 eq emissions. However, it is dangerous to
conclude that it is not important which energy source is chosen. If
hypothetically, the use of district heating would dramatically drop, the
primary energy factor and CO2 eq emissions from electricity
would rise, which in turn would lead to the increase of the ground heat
systems emissions. A problem in the yearly calculations is that the fact
that it is very important, sometimes even crucial, when energy is
needed, is always excluded.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 844-858 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Sustainability |
Volume | 2 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2010 |
MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Keywords
- energy efficiency
- primary energy
- building concepts