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Retrofitting buildings to support green recovery in ASEAN countries
Improvements in the existing stock of residential buildings will be key to reaching energy efficiency targets.
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A building in the Public Works and Housing Ministry office compound in Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta, is pictured. The Green Building Council Indonesia (GBCI) has certified the building as environmentally friendly. (Kompas.com/-)
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OVID-19 has caused the building sector’s energy consumption to undergo significant shifts and volatility. The work-from-home culture has dealt a severe blow to demand for commercial real estate. The lack of occupancy translates to reduced energy use in buildings. This dampens the need for energy efficiency improvement in commercial buildings, which were previously the target of many energy efficiency initiatives.
As the world deals with the pandemic and with a more remarkable shift toward working from home, it is anticipated that residential buildings will be the epicenters of energy improvements. Improvements in the existing stock of residential buildings will be key to reaching energy efficiency targets. Issues arise, however, when considering the potential retrofit solutions for the current residential building stock.
Residential buildings typically utilize air-cooled split units, hence improvements in standards and labels are the only measures that can be implemented for residential space cooling. Aside from the use of LED lighting, building envelope improvements are the only energy-saving measure that can also be carried out, but this is typically very expensive despite studies that show that building envelopment improvements in residential units in Indonesia can potentially save 69 percent of energy use in a building’s 40-year lifespan.
The pandemic continues to influence the building sector in the region. The occupancy rate of office spaces and hotels in the ASEAN region has suffered because of the movement toward working from home and strict travel restrictions. The occupancy rate has dropped in some ASEAN countries. Office occupancy in the central business districts of Jakarta has sunk to a five-year low in the second quarter of 2021, dipping below 80 percent for the first time, and it is projected to continue decreasing.
With building owners facing occupancy challenges due to the pandemic, energy efficiency measures have dropped down on their priority list. The legal perspective is that a low occupancy rate means low energy consumption.
However, in many cases, energy consumption in commercial buildings has remained the same when it could have gone down. Centralized chilled water systems have a minimum load, and hence, while occupancy decreases, total building load may not drop in tandem. This shows that even though office and hotel occupancy rates have been low, energy efficiency measures in the buildings sector are still necessary.
The benefits of energy efficiency have been acknowledged, with governments trying to recover from the pandemic sustainably or "greenly". Energy efficiency offers many benefits, including social, environmental and economic (macro and micro-economic) dimensions.
