Investigating reducing building energy use at urban scale in Taipei

• Main Author: Lin, Ko-Yang
• Published: Cardiff University 2013
• Subjects: NA Architecture
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.585274

Sustainable development related design and research has shown a focus shift from new building projects to existing ones; from the building scale to the regional and the urban scale; from construct and assessing the energy performance of buildings to participating at an earlier design stage. Taipei has been selected as the subject of this research due to its extremely high urbanization and huge pressure from the existing built environment. In order to achieve the national goal for reducing CO2 emissions, appropriate localized guidelines for buildings are urgently needed. Therefore, this research aims to understand, analyze and predict the energy performance of the architectures in Taipei, and offers a series of design strategies to help reduce the energy demand at building and urban scales. This will be achieved through the application of modelling, integrating SketchUp (@Last Software 2000), HTB2 v2.10 (WSA 2008; Alexander 2008), and Virvil Plugins (WSA 2012; Jones et al. 2011). The whole research process is a two-phase study. The first phase is to create models at different scales based on observation of the practical building environment, analysis of architecture related data and practical situations in Taipei, and then simulate them in a bottom-up method to understand the fundamental energy performance of different buildings, groups, blocks and districts. In the second phase, the model is extended to examine important variables and related strategies at both building and urban scales. This research finds that lighting, equipment efficiency, temperature settings of AC systems, orientation, glazing ratio, shading devices, and wall-to-volume ratio are important variables for architectures at building scale. Furthermore, development intensity, block usage type, wall-to-volume ratio, volume rate, building coverage ratio, average building height, surrounding road width, over-shading, insulation and outdoor environment are comparatively critical at urban scale. Additional interesting findings showed that the impacts brought by orientation, shading device, and insulation are not consistent at different scales. Lastly, some guidelines are presented to be used as a reference for new and existing buildings.