Built Expressions Bangalore :: TERI Augments Tool Kit For Energy Efficient Housing Projects

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TERI augments Tool Kit for Energy Efficient Housing Projects

To facilitate the usage of IT Toolkit: ResBuild, TERI conducted a promotional workshop to train builders, consultants, engineers and architects.

Earlier, energy efficiency was a matter of interest only to the stakeholders of the house construction. With changing times, the energy efficient homes are increasingly gaining magnitude even among the home buyers. As per the survey, among aesthetics and quality of products, energy efficiency is also a key merit while buying a house.

With such awareness surrounding the buyers, it is high time for builders to enhance their competence to offer for their customers. To cash in on such a scenario, National Housing Bank (NHB) has an initiative—‘Energy Efficient Homes Programme,’ supported by the German development bank Kreditanstalt fur Wiederaufbau (KfW) under the bilateral agreement between India and Germany. As a part of this initiative, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), together with the German Development Bank (KfW), the Indian National Housing Bank (NHB), and Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics (IBP), had developed an energy efficiency toolkit for buildings, called ‘IT Toolkit: Resbuild India.’ There is a plethora of IT tool kit to assess the energy efficiency of only commercial buildings. However, ResBuild is the only IT tool kit for residential housing in India. It is an easy-to-use assessment tool to predict the energy performance of upcoming residential building projects in the country, without going into the complexities of detailed energy simulations.

To create awareness and encourage the usage of this IT tool, TERI along with the National Housing Bank recently conducted a workshop for builders, architects, engineers, housing finance companies and public lending institutions. This assessment tool calculates the energy performance of residential building projects, and provides the basis for refinancing housing loans. ITToolkit EnEff:ResBuild India is very handy and can be used by most of the building professionals to take decisions, beforehand the construction process starts. Building professionals can carry out parametric analysis to arrive at the most effective Energy Conservation Measure (ECM) combination, which is building envelope, cooling/heating system and hot water system for their project in a given budget and see how much efficient their project is vis-à-vis a reference case which gets generated in background for every project separately. This tool also helps in labeling and certification mechanism for energy savings in buildings. Under this program the energy savings potential identified by the toolkit can be used by lending institutions to apply for financial support from KfW and NHB to fund purchases of certified energy efficient apartments.

Since the inception of this assessment IT tool, the programme currently has certified 11 projects, which includes around 120 towers with 20,192 residential units. The programme has led to an overall average energy savings of 22 percent. Efforts are being made to identify more such projects to be part of the programme. Ms. Milli Majumdar, director, Sustainable Habitat Division, TERI, said, “Even though the success rate of the ITToolkit EnEff:ResBuild India is high, we felt the need of training the consultants, who want to use it.”

TERI avers that eminent builders and architects have been successfully using ResBuild to assess energy efficiency in their residential projects.

ITToolkit EnEff:ResBuild

The objective of the toolkit is to calculate the projected energy demand and to identify energy saving potential in comparison to a reference building.

This energy saving potential may be used to apply for loans according to the KfW/NHB program on energy efficient residential buildings.

The Assessment tool itself allows the user to enter the following data:

General information on the building project to be assessed
Key features of the building envelop (geometry, orientation, building materials, etc.)
Technologies used for space cooling, heating, lighting and hot water

The main features are:

Easy to handle and intuitive approach to energy demand calculation
Kick start your project with the project wizard including sample buildings
On time calculations and display of results in an overview area. The impact of every change can be seen immediately.
Automatically updates the reference building after every change and calculates the reference energy demand and the energy savings potential.
Shows energy savings potential
Loan application certificates

The Energy Efficient Homes Programme finances new residential housing in major urban areas achieving significant energy savings compared to reference. This programme is planned under the bilateral agreement between Indian and Germany. Designed as Promotional Programme for New Energy Efficient Residential Housing, the KfW provides a line of credit up to 50 million Euros to the NHB for refinancing individual home buyer loans for energy efficient residential buildings.

New residential buildings that need at least 30 percent less electricity than the standard receive an energy saving certificate. Technical consultants support the developers in identifying improvement measures for higher energy efficiency of their buildings. The certified developments are then entitled to use a label indicating the extent of energy savings following star-label logic—the more stars the higher the energy savings. Home buyers buying an apartment in certified developments get an Energy Efficiency Loan from financial institutions participating in the programme. These loans are eligible for refinancing by NHB under the programme.

Mr. Johannes Alexeew, project manager, Adelphi, said, “In the coming years, energy efficient housing will take prominence and certification and labeling of these projects will increase value proposition. In addition, we are looking at integrated energy efficient housing in the government mandate as people in India believe such programmes should be endorsed by government.”

Benefits of 'The Energy Efficient Homes Programme'

Home buyers, building developers and financial institutions (HFCs and Banks) could get immensely benefitted by becoming a part of this programme.

Home buyers

Sustained savings of energy and cutting of expenses on electricity bills
Increase in quality of living conditions

Building Developers

Being a first-mover in the promising field of energy efficient housing
Certification for marketing purposes as well as increasing value proposition to attract customers in the highly competitive residential housing market
Cost-free advisory services and training for energy efficient measures
Access to our easy-to-use toolkit ResBuild to calculate energy savings

Financial Institutions