The Relationship of Embodied Energy and Cost of Buildings and Building Materials

9 pages•Published: September 25, 2020

Manish Kumar Dixit, Sarel Lavy and Parag Abdagiri

Abstract

Buildings consume nearly half of global energy each year in their construction and operation as embodied and operational energy releasing approximately 40% of global carbon emission. Embodied energy (EE) is consumed indirectly through the use of construction materials, assemblies, and equipment, and directly in construction processes and related transportation. Operational energy (OE) is consumed in building air-conditioning, heating, lighting, and powering equipment. Both EE and OE must be minimized to lower this huge energy footprint of buildings. To decrease EE, a complete and accurate EE assessment is essential, which, however, is a quite data-intensive and time-consuming process. EE is conventionally computed using process- and input-output (IO)-based methods. Hybrid approaches that combine the two methods are also used to compute EE. In an IO-based method, macroeconomic data is translated into energy flows, which indicates a potential relationship between energy and economic flows, and consequently between EE and cost. In this paper, we investigated the EE-cost relationship at the building and construction material levels and found a strong positive correlation between the EE and cost of the study buildings. The results indicate a need to further analyze this relationship through regression analysis to see if EE can be predicted from cost data.

Keyphrases: construction materials, cost, embodied carbon, embodied energy, life cycle energy

In: Tom Leathem (editor). Associated Schools of Construction Proceedings of the 56th Annual International Conference, vol 1, pages 454-462.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/ZJM4
	https://doi.org/10.29007/8lk1

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{ASC2020:Relationship_Embodied_Energy_Cost,
  author    = {Manish Kumar Dixit and Sarel Lavy and Parag Abdagiri},
  title     = {The Relationship of Embodied Energy and Cost of Buildings and Building Materials},
  booktitle = {Associated Schools of Construction Proceedings of the 56th Annual International Conference},
  editor    = {Tom Leathem},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Built Environment},
  volume    = {1},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2632-881X},
  url       = {/publications/paper/ZJM4},
  doi       = {10.29007/8lk1},
  pages     = {454-462},
  year      = {2020}}

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