Volume 12: Low Carbon Cities and Urban Energy Systems: Part I

A preliminary research on the benchmark of building resource consumption and sustainable strategies in Chinese eastern cities – Qingdao as a case study Panyu Zhu, Thomas Wilken, Vanessa Miriam Carlow, Elisabeth Endres

Abstract

With China’s urbanization process, a number of medium-sized cities in the south eastern coastal areas have also entered a period of rapid development. Fast-growing cities are facing many challenges, such as housing demand and resource depletion in connection with the rapid population growth. Building industry, which contributes to a large amount of resource use, plays an important role in climate change. Along with the updating of energy saving standards, the thermal condition of building envelopes has also been dramatically improved. Therefore, energy consumption for space heating and cooling has been significantly reduced in recent years. However, there is still a lack of research concerning the embodied energy mainly caused by material use. A benchmark of life-cycle resource use in the building sector is urgently required in practice in order to achieve a more sustainable development in China. This research took the city Qingdao as a case study and examined lifecycle resource use of typical office and residential buildings with different structures and thermal conditions. The method and result could be considered as a reference for a more complete research on a building lifecycle resource use in the future. In the end of this paper, a neighborhood in Qingdao was taken as a case study to show the application of resource use benchmark in the future.

Keywords Resource use benchmark, Environmental Impact, Chinese eastern cities, Embodied energy, Life-cycle analysis, Sustainable strategies