[photopress:powerefficientbuilding.jpg,full,alignright]At the moment energy-saving housing only accounts for 3.5 percent of China’s urban residential construction. Which is very low. Taking newly constructed buildings as a whole less than 10 percenthave adopted energy-saving cooling, heating and lighting systems.
Liu Zhifeng, vice minister of construction, said, ‘The energy consumed in heating every square meter of housing in China is two to three times that in a developed country.’ (In fact, that seems a most dubious claim and would need verifying.)
Housing accounts for 27.6 percent of China’s total energy consumption. China is becoming increasingly dependent on oil imports and the government has made improving energy efficiency a priority.
There is now an ambitious goal to reduce total energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product by 20 percent over the next five years. It is widely accepted that it is, at the very least, theoretically possible but will need an immense effort. In the past year China’s energy consumption per GDP unit actually climbed by 0.8 percent year on year.
To attain its conservation goal, the government has been drafting new laws and regulations. The latest one, being drafted by the State Council, includes a comprehensive set of rules covering market threshold for developers, old-architecture transformation, housing management, and power-efficiency assessment. Another regulation bans developers of power-wasting buildings from applying for any architecture award.
The last is something of a joke. What this is about is money.
Du Tong, a construction engineer based in Beijing said, ‘The key to developing power-efficient buildings is the cost.’ An energy-efficient building will cost the developer, and consequently the homebuyer, about 10 percent more than a building without energy-saving systems. In a madly competitive market this is not attractive to the developer.
Asia Times Online
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