Eco-efficient solutions for China's urbanization: Guidebook

China is one of the largest economies in the world and also one of the world's biggest energy consumers. China is a big country, with five major climates requiring different building and building energy solutions. In addition, China's urbanisation rate is over 40%. It is estimated that the proportion of urban dwellers out of the whole population will be about 70% by the end of 2030. The EESCU project (Eco-efficient Solutions for China's Urbanization) aimed at building the theoretical and practical bases in order to support the implementation of the Finnish eco-efficient solutions and concepts in Chinese markets. This is the final report of the project which summarizes the main results. The project started with an inventory phase focusing on basic building energy-related issues in China. These covered urbanisation, climate regions, energy regulations and current building energy consumption values based on the available statistics and literature. The total energy consumption in 2009 was 3 billion tons of standard coal. The project had three main research sections, namely "Zero Energy Buildings", "Regional Energy Solutions" and "Energy Renovations of Existing Buildings". All these sections consisted of theoretical sections, concept developments and examples from both Finland and China. In addition, building commissioning in China was discussed, pilots and show cases from real buildings were reported and business-related topics covered. In "Zero Energy Buildings", the concept of net zero energy buildings was first specified, providing a definition of zero energy building, energy use and supply mismatch, and explaining the differences between the cold climate zero energy concept and the warm climate zero energy concept. After the concept overview, examples of zero energy buildings were presented from Europe and China. Then, the low-exergy principle referring to the quality of energy was discussed with examples. In "Regional Energy Solutions", the system selection and performance evaluation principle was introduced first. This was followed by the design guidelines for district energy systems and the principles of a district energy system concept. In this study, the main emphasis was on renewable energy production technologies and, therefore, their basic production means were also discussed. Renewable energy solutions often require some energy storage solutions as well, so the basic means were also covered. This section ended with case study examples. Building renovation is rare in China. The real average life span of China's residential buildings is only 25 to 30 years. For non-residential buildings, it is often even shorter. The factors affecting the low renovation rate and the renovation process have been discussed and then energy-efficient and modular technologies for building renovation have been reported.