Nearly 70 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities by the year 2050, and cities currently pump out 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Buildings alone contribute nearly 40 per cent of emissions. To limit emissions, the future of urban architecture must be green.
This is also true for Indian cities, which are responsible for 40 per cent per cent of the energy use, 30 per cent of raw material use, and 20 per cent of land use. The residential and commercial buildings account for 31 per cent of the electricity consumption and are rising at 10-12 per cent annually. As per estimates, approximately 75 per cent of the building stock that India will see in the year 2047 is yet to be built. The projections estimate 6-10 time increase in electricity demand in commercial buildings and 4-10 times increase in residential buildings from 2012 to 2047. There is thus currently a window of opportunity to reduce the building sector’s energy consumption through means of mainstreaming highly energy-efficient new buildings and the use of renewable energy in buildings.
BASE and partners from the International Institute for Energy Conservation (IIEC) are implementing the Renewable Energy Integration into Buildings project, which builds upon the Indo-Swiss Building Energy Efficiency Project (BEEP). The project is funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). The BEEP project has shown that 30-45 per cent of energy savings are possible by adopting various energy efficiency measures in buildings. In India, there is a growing understanding of the need to make buildings shift from energy consumers to become energy generators by integrating different renewable energy technologies.
The integration of renewable energy in buildings has the potential to complement energy efficient designs of high-performance new buildings by reducing the energy requirements from conventional technologies to a minimum. These building-integrated sources allow the use of local resources, reduce distribution losses and take advantage of the large surface occupied by different categories of buildings. The broad objective of the Integration of Renewable Energy in Buildings in India project is to design, showcase, implement and monitor 2-3 innovative buildings integrated renewable energy technologies in multi-storey buildings, and to develop business models and financing mechanism to help the technologies to scale. The project also aims to strengthen local skills at the governmental as well as non-governmental level in India.
