Reducing energy usage in multi-family housing

The energy usage in residential sector have been around 22% of the total energy use in the world and increasing due to the population growth and higher living standards. The energy sources for this are made up primarily of non-renewable energy resources which generates a large amount of global greenhouse gases. A lot of countries have implemented various regulations and rules to reduce the energy usage in buildings and promoting the use of renewable energy technologies. This paper presents a parametric study of a typical multi-family building in its pre-design stage. The climate location used is Sweden (Gothenburg) and Japan (Osaka). The aim of the study is to compare various configurations and to examine how they affect the energy use. The most interesting configurations are the use of heat pump and solar cells. Other configurations that are examined are infiltration levels, pressure coefficients, wind impact, ventilation with heat recovery, ventilation scheduling, building orientation and finally changing U-values in the building material. Results of this study show that the energy saving, by utilizing a heat pump and solar panels, can reduce the total energy use by 34.9% for Gothenburg and 32% for Osaka. The results also show that the difference in total energy use between the two cities reduce substantially (3% difference) when utilizing a heat pump in combination with solar panels.