The Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning

Research Project: Comparative values for the energy consumption of non-residential buildings

Project briefing

  • Status Completed
  • Project duration January 2020 – March 2021
  • Programme Future Building

Due to the need to continuously update the empirical comparative values for the energy consumption of non-residential buildings, it is intended, in the course of the amendment of the Building Energy Act (Gebäudeenergiegesetz or GEG), to redetermine the comparative values published within the announcement to the EnEV on 7 April 2015. For this purpose, the comparative values are to be calculated and tabulated based on the REK methodology (Referenz-Energie-Kennwert Methodik).

Background

The current methodology of the first amendment compares the actual electricity and heat consumption of the building with the current comparative values representing the mean values of an associated building category, additionally reduced by around 30 %. In contrast, the REK methodology compares the actual consumption values with calculated characteristic specific energy values for electricity and heat according to the type of system and building zone, based on the energy-related attributes of the building at the building-zone level.

The principles of the current announcement to the EnEV (as of 7 April 2015) are to be retained, in the context of the amendment’s updated publication of the comparative values, i.e. their tabulated form of presentation and allocation to a building by its category. However, the comparative values of single building categories are to be calculated based on the REK methodology. Thus, further methodological approaches were developed and applied within the scope of this study to adapt the REK methodology developed by the IWU in a previous project for particular building categories (see BBSR online publication 20/2019: Vergleichswerte für den Energieverbrauch von Nichtwohngebäuden) to. This implies a categorisation of the non-residential building stock, as well as the standardisation of typical building category usage zones and technical systems.

Objective

The aims and scope of the study are the:

  • definition of the relevant building categories;
  • determining the typical usage zones of the relevant building categories;
  • identification of typical technical installations for the typical usage zones;
  • calculation of the comparative values for the relevant building categories based on the REK methodology;
  • comparison of the estimated comparative values with available measured consumption data for validation of the results.

The contractor of the research project was the Institute for Housing and Environment (Institut Wohnen und Umwelt or IWU) in Darmstadt.

Contact us

  • Melanie Bart
    Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development
    Division WB 2 "Instrumente zur Emissionsminderung im Gebäudebereich"
    Phone: +49 228 99401-2723
    Email: melanie.bart@bbr.bund.de

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