Rethinking the concept of building energy rating system in Australia: a pathway to life-cycle net-zero energy building design

Abstract

Over the last decades, Australia has taken several measures to tackle the increasing trend of energy use in residential buildings. Recently, the Trajectory for Low Energy Buildings has been endorsed aiming to reduce energy usage in residential buildings. However, the primary focus of this trajectory is on decreasing operational energy without considering the embodied energy of the building and systems. This paper aims to address one primary question; ‘can the continued exclusion of embodied energy from the energy efficiency regulations effectively lead to reducing energy consumption in Australian residential buildings?’. The findings indicate that embodied energy becomes a dominating factor as buildings’ thermal performances increase according to the Australian energy efficiency regulations. In transitioning from a standard 6.0-star building to a highly energy-efficient 8.7-star building, the proportion of embodied energy significantly increases from 20–40% to 50–75%. This study recommends establishing minimum mandatory requirements for buildings’ embodied performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Zero energy building
• embodied energy
• thermal performance
• building regulations
• building design
• optimization design
• Australia

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the technical advices and constructive feedback provided by Dr. Ruidong Chang and Professor Jian Zuo from the University of Adelaide on the earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.