Lifecycle Assessment of Beijing-Area Building Energy Use and Emissions: Summary Findings and Policy Applications

Buildings are at the locus of three trends driving China's increased energy use and emissions: urbanization, growing personal consumption, and surging heavy industrial production. Migration to cities and urban growth create demand for new building construction. Higher levels of per-capita income and consumption drive building operational energy use with demand for higher intensity lighting, thermal comfort, and plug-load power. Demand for new buildings, infrastructure, and electricity requires heavy industrial production. In order to quantify the implications of China's ongoing urbanization, rising personal consumption, and booming heavy industrial sector, this study presents a lifecycle assessment (LCA) of the energy use and carbon emissions related to residential and commercial buildings. The purpose of the LCA model is to quantify the impact of a given building and identify policy linkages to mitigate energy demand and emissions growth related to China's new building construction. As efficiency has become a higher priority with growing energy demand, policy and academic attention to buildings has focused primarily on operational energy use. Existing studies estimate that building operational energy consumption accounts for approximately 25% of total primary energy use in China. However, buildings also require energy for mining, extracting, processing, manufacturing, and transporting materials, as well as energy for construction, maintenance, and decommissioning. Building and supporting infrastructure construction is a major driver of industry consumption--in 2008 industry accounted for 72% of total Chinese energy use. The magnitude of new building construction is large in China--in 2007, for example, total built floor area reached 58 billion square meters. During the construction boom in 2007 and 2008, more than two billion m{sup 2} of building space were added annually; China's recent construction is estimated to account for half of global construction. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) developed an integrated LCA model to capture the energy and emissions implications of all aspects of new buildings from material mining through construction, operations, and decommissioning. Over the following four sections, this report describes related existing research, the LBNL building LCA model structure and results, policy linkages of this lifecycle assessment, and conclusions and recommendations for follow-on work. The LBNL model is a first-order approach to gathering local data and applying lifecycle assessment to buildings in the Beijing area--it represents one effort among a range of established, predominantly American and European, LCA models. This report identifies the benefits, limitations, and policy applications of lifecycle assessment modeling for quantifying the energy and emissions impacts of specific residential and commercial buildings