Decoding India’s residential building stock characteristics to enable effective energy efficiency policies and programs

Panel: 7. Make buildings policies great again

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Sandeep Kachhawa, AEEE, India
Satish Kumar, Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy, India
Mohini Singh, Alliance for an Energy Efficient Economy, India

Abstract

Data is precursor to data-driven and evidence-based policies and promote strategic interventions for overall transformation. For building sector, energy related policy making hinge on the availability of data on the building characteristics like building type, floor area, electricity usage etc.

Residential sector in India, consumes approximately 24% of the national electricity (IESS) with 45% of the demand generated from the space cooling (BEE,2018). While the overall electricity consumption is accounted at national and sub-national level, there is lack of information of demand generated from each sub-sector i.e. High, Medium and Low Income Group due to fragmented character and absence of data disclosure laws. Several sub-sectoral level efforts have manifested into formulating strategies addressing thermal comfort, embodied and operational energy; however, a holistic approach is required to unleash full potential of energy efficiency and to support India’s national and international commitments on climate change.

The study proffers a top down approach to decode residential stock with two fold objectives:

(a) to inform meaningful insights about the current and near to medium term residential stock growth pattern like floor area, space cooling appliances and electricity consumption for various income groups, thus identifying key areas for interventions and enabling evidence-based national policies, and

(b) to promote thermal comfort for all by exploring cost effective and energy-efficient space cooling strategies for various income groups to address India’s escalating cooling electricity needs.

The data accounting is a first-of-its-kind exercise to bridge the building sector electricity consumption related data gap, by devising methodologies and illuminating key sources of data for long term assistance to researchers, policy makers and business community in conducting market sizing exercises in future that remain central to promoting data driven policy measures.