Energy efficiency initiatives and regulations for commercial buildings in India: a review

The unprecedented growth in energy sector in recent decades due to population growth, industrialization, and urbanization results in high carbon and greenhouse gases emissions. The per capita electricity consumption has increased from 2.1 MWh in 1990 to 3.3 MWh in 2018 and energy demand is rising at an annual rate of 3.4% globally, of which nearly 30% is from India. The buildings consume nearly 48% of electricity which is the highest among the various sectors in the globe. The increase in energy demand will further be altered with population growth, affecting energy security and energy access. This will be a concern especially in countries with high population growth, like India. To overcome this, energy efficiency in the building sector is necessary which is addressed through energy regulations at international, national, regional and local levels. But due to the poor development & implementation of these regulations and ignoring their relationship with energy consumption, the effect of these regulations is not clearly visible and hence there is a need to determine components of regulations and its parameters to enhance the effectiveness of energy regulations. In this paper, energy regulation for commercial buildings of 18 different countries have been compared for regulation components namely structure, enforcement criteria, revision schedule, & energy efficiency measures and further energy regulations timeline is compared with the energy consumption trend for determining its effectiveness. Further, various initiatives and existing energy regulations for commercial buildings in India are discussed and compared to identify comprehensive list of parameters responsible for energy efficiency in commercial buildings. Also, a case study of five commercial hotel buildings is performed to determine physical specifications of building envelope using survey questionnaire; comparison between the energy efficiency requirements in existing regulation and in case studied buildings using methodology of ECBC 2019 and IS:3792; regulation components namely structure, enforcement criteria, revision schedule, energy efficiency measures covered in existing regulation; annual energy consumption break-up of hotel buildings from data collected using survey questionnaire and validated from energy bills and finally to determine the role of physical specification of building envelope towards energy consumption to determine the effectiveness of existing regulations. It has been found that the regulation components are the important factors which are responsible for the effectiveness of energy regulation. Further, the performance audit, and penalty provisions for non-compliance increase its effectiveness. Moreover, providing incentives for compliance helped in increasing the adoption to a greater extent. Apart from this, 6 different indicators, namely building envelope, site conditions, water and wastewater, building materials, energy consuming applications, and energy efficiency analysis; and 41 parameters responsible for energy efficiency are identified for the development of any energy regulation. None of the studied buildings in the study area comply with the mandatory or prescriptive requirements of regulation, resulting in higher energy consumption and therefore, the existing energy regulation needs to be more stringent with strong enforcement & compliance evaluation, and penalties need to be imposed necessarily for non-compliance. The findings of this study are proposed to be included in the National Building Code of India for comprehensive upgradation. The outcome of this study will be useful for developing energy regulations at national, regional and local levels by a country in which energy regulations are yet to be regulated or are regulated but not effective in nature.