Embodied and operational energy of rural dwellings in India

ABSTRACT

On a global scale, buildings are responsible for significant energy consumption. While the energy intake of urban buildings has been studied well, there are barely any studies on rural dwellings. The current paper examines the embodied energy (EE), operational energy (OE) and life-cycle energy (LCE) of 27 rural dwellings spread across four climate zones of India. It is found that these rural dwellings use locally available least-processed natural materials with very low EE. However, with the advent of modern transportation, manufactured energy-intensive construction materials have reached rural areas. From the analysis it is seen that the EE ranges from 0.002 to 2.8 GJ/m², the annual OE from 0.006 to 0.053 GJ/m² and the LCE from 0.77 to 4.05 GJ/m² for the rural dwellings studied, with mass ranging from 1.13 to 3.6 t/m².

KEYWORDS:

• Embodied energy
• operational energy
• life-cycle energy
• rural dwellings

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.