Building energy performance of air-conditioned office buildings in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, there is a growing concern about energy consumption in buildings, especially fully air-conditioned non-domestic buildings, and its implications for the environment. As an initial step to raise awareness of energy efficiency among the building professions and to encourage more energy-efficient building designs, the government, in 1995, introduced a code of practice for the overall thermal transfer value (OTTV) in buildings, which deals with the design of building envelopes. More recently, several codes of practice and design guidelines on the building services installations for non-domestic buildings were also issued to the building professions. All these are prescriptive in nature. Building energy simulation techniques using DOE-2.1E have been adopted to investigate the likely energy performance of a generic office building, which meet the basic requirements stipulated in the codes of practice and design guidelines on both the building envelope and the building services installations. It has been found that the annual energy consumption per unit floor area would be in the order of 200kWh/m(2). This paper describes the work and presents its findings. Implications for the development performance-based energy codes for buildings in Hong Kong are also discussed.