The benefits were immediately evident. When the outdoor temperature had risen to 34ºC, it was 28ºC in Jiang Shuzhen’s apartment on the fourth floor.

The government and private enterprise shouldered 96 percent of the cost of the weatherization project for the four buildings in the community. On average every family paid only RMB 1,100 for new windows and radiators. Renovations saved every family nearly RMB 200 on their electricity bill annually. On July 1, 2010, Beijing implemented a new rule, allowing government-subsidized renovations to homes with low energy efficiency on the request of the property owners. According to Sui Zhenjiang, chief of Beijing’s Residence and Urban-rural Construction Committee, a home’s energy use can be engineered to drop an impressive 30 to 50 percent depending on its condition and location, and its indoor temperature rises at least 4 ºC in wintertime.

Public Building Battleground

The office building of the Beijing Energy-saving and Environmental Protection Center (BEEPC) showcases a dozen of the world’s most advanced technologies for enhancing energy efficiency. It is part of a municipal government program started in 2007 to weatherize its office buildings and public facilities, and converts 30 to 50 buildings a year.

According to Logistic Department chief Jin Ruishan, the BEEPC, now 20 years old, has increased its energy preservation effectiveness to 85 percent. Staple renovations to the building include cool roofing technology (a special coating on the roof that diverts more than 80 percent of the sun’s rays, therefore keeping the surface temperature to about that of the human body). Another is the solar heating system. Solar panels atop the building are connected to electric boilers indoors. Drinking water is warmed up to 85 ºC by the former, then transferred to the latter to reach a rolling boil for occupants to make tea or coffee. This system alone brings down electricity use by more than 14,000 kwh a year. Green-living awareness is integrated into the design of every part of the building. Sunlight supplies the lighting. Assisted by optical fiber technologies, facilities on the roof reflect natural light into the interior, cutting power consumption for illumination to zero. The list goes on. The window glass and curtains are all heat-blocking. Elevators automatically change their power setting to match demand. The intelligent lighting system is controlled by sound and light. Toilets provide waterless flushes. Rainwater collection and recycling extends the water supply to its maximum life.

The renovation of Beijing’s public buildings covers seven aspects: the enclosing structure, air-conditioning, heating, ventilation, lighting, power transmission and distribution, the hot water supply and other energy-consuming systems. In the capital, large public buildings account for only 5.4 percent of civil buildings, so one might well ask what difference renovations are going to make. Large public buildings guzzle nearly half of electricity used in the non-commercial category, in fact. Their unit-space energy consumption is 10 to 15 times that of residential buildings. Reining in their huge appetite can have significant impact on a city’s energy consumption. Of the seven targets however, air-conditioning and heating are the priorities, for they absorb more than half any given building’s energy use.

The China World Trade Center, an impressive compound of hotel and commercial spaces, began to upgrade the air blowers of its central air-conditioning in 2006, after realizing that for most of the time the air-conditioning systems operate at 80 percent of the designed load. Work has been completed on 30 blowers so far, saving 680,000 kwh of power annually. According to an official on the Beijing Construction Committee, once all public buildings in the city (totaling 36.3 million square meters) are renovated for energy efficiency, the need for 450,000 tons of coal for heating will be eliminated every year, plus the equivalent of 150,000 tons of coal for electricity. The bonus is that their sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions will also be reduced by 5,000 tons and 4,800 tons respectively.

So far China has conducted energy consumption surveys on approximately 30,000 large public buildings across the nation, and is monitoring 700 of them on energy use and carbon dioxide discharge. Those found lax on the index will be required to undertake upgrading.

Once commitments are met, energy management companies are paid by installments the difference saved on utility bills.

Immense Market Potential

There’s no sign these building trends will peter out. The Architecture Power Saving Research Center of Tsinghua University predicts that the floorage of Chinese buildings will expand by another 10 billion square meters by 2020. If all the new buildings strictly honor the energy-efficiency rules, they can save the nation 380 million tons of coal and prevent 995 million tons of carbon dioxide from entering the environment. Meeting these goals generates a huge market. “China’s investment in energy-saving housing projects will reach RMB 150 million or more by 2020,” estimates Ai Xia, chief research officer at China State Construction International Holdings Limited. The sector of architectural energy conservation continues to grow briskly in the nation. For instance, domestic production of exterior wall insulation materials barely existed 20 years ago. Now its output is the world’s largest, and the product lines cover the full spectrum in terms of both composition and technique.

But Huang Wei, a scholar with the China Academy of Building Research, cautions that the manufacture of energy-saving products is only one link in the whole process. Energy-saving cannot be enforced systematically and broadly without planning and management using the appropriate expertise and market-oriented insight and foresight; these are roles that energy management companies (EMC) or energy service companies (ESCO) assume. EMC make energy-saving plans for their clients, and supervise their implementation. The savings goals are specified in the contract. Once commitments are met, EMCs are paid by installments the difference saved on utility bills. In this arrangement, clients are not required to make a starting investment, but instead return the cost by sharing the gains from energy-thrift with EMCs after seeing the effects of the latter’s work. Freed from investment pressure, clients are also spared the pain and cost of handling tasks that should be informed by several sciences and that demand special expertise.

The first EMCs appeared in China in 2002, and they have received increasing support from all levels of government since 2006. One recent incentive offered is to subsidize their clients directly. In 2009 Haidian District in northern Beijing hired EMCs for energy-saving projects on 180 public buildings. These companies collected a sea of data for intense analysis on all aspects of their targets, including the heating, air-conditioning, hot water supply and power systems. Implementation of their prescriptions has now boosted the energy efficiency of these buildings, on average, by 20 percent on central air-conditioning systems and 60 to 80 percent on pumps and air blowers.