The central aim of the 2015 Paris Agreement is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping global temperature rise in this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius (United Nations 2015). To reach this ambitious goal, countries have to implement the following two strategies: (i) enhancing energy efficiency and (ii) decarbonizing remaining energy supply and demand, in particular by large penetration of renewable energy sources. A comprehensive mix of policy instruments is necessary to support this transition. While countries have implemented a wide array of policies, new societal trends and emerging technologies require the development and adoption of other policies.
Many scenario-based models already consider the impact of economic policies such as carbon trading systems. However more research is necessary to consider non-economic policies for capturing system dynamics and in particular, the impact of these trends on the future energy and material demand. This is
important because of its impact on greenhouse gas emissions.
To narrow the gap in existing literature, this report analyses two policy cases relevant for buildings. The first case focuses on a market pull mechanism for the industry sectors and analyzes the contribution of green public procurement to the exploitation of circular economy potentials for material demand reduction in buildings. The second case investigates technology push in the tertiary sector and analyses smart buildings policies for promoting building automation and control systems (BACS) and related energy demand reductions in buildings.
For the analysis of green public procurement, we apply a material flow model and a material intensity database for Germany (Lotz et al. NYP; Lotz et al. 2022b). This geographical scope has been chosen due to data availability. The analyses cover three green public procurement policy cases:
- The Industrial Deep Decarbonisation Initiative pledge proposing quotas for the use of low-carbon materials (production stage);
- Thresholds for embedded carbon in buildings (design stage);
- Criteria for building adaptability and deconstruction (use and end-of-life stage).
The results show that green public procurement is a versatile instrument due to the different design options addressing diverse value chain stages and circular economy actions. Nevertheless, the share of public activities in the construction sector is limited. Consequently, this measure is mostly relevant in the short to medium term. On the one hand, green public procurement can create lead markets supporting production-side policies. On the other, it is possible to gather experience for the roll-out of policies that foster circular economy to the complete construction sector. Overall, it is important to align green public procurement with other policy instruments for efficiently exploiting the potentials of a circular economy for buildings.
The analysis of smart building case is based on the recent revisions of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). Notably, fostering smart buildings in both residential and non-residential buildings is an explicit policy priority. To achieve smart buildings, BACS need to be implemented. To fully understand their impact, we do a final energy demand simulation, adopted from a previous expansion of the smart building modelling in the FORECAST energy demand simulation model. Using this implementation in the smart building model, we align the diffusion parameterization of FORECAST with the EPBD and derive results for the tertiary sectors and its subsectors.
The aggregated economically feasible final energy saving potential from BACS measures in medium to larger tertiary buildings reaches over 9% in 2030. The implication is that the current EPBD will likely promote economically viable energy savings. If some measures are not viable in certain buildings, policymakers may consider additional support to reap “high-hanging” fruits. In conclusion, both cases show exemplary results for the improved consideration of current policy cases and different mechanisms, i.e. market pull and technology push. Future research should extend the limitations of current model approaches, especially with regard to data availability.
