Methodologies for assessment of building ' s energy efficiency and conservation : A policy - maker view

Recent global peer-review reports have concluded on importance of buildings in tacking the energy security and climate change challenges. To integrate the buildings energy efficiency into the policy agenda, significant research efforts have been recently done. More specifically, the public domain provides a bulk of literature on the application of buildings-related efficiency technologies and behavioural patterns, barriers to penetration of these practices, policies to overcome these barriers. From the policy-making perspective it is useful to understand how far our understanding of building energy efficiency goes and the approaches and methodologies are behind such assessment. This paper aims to address this issue; it describes the knowledge on building assessment, from the policy-maker standpoint. More specifically, the paper describes the key approaches to assess technological and non-technological potentials, then it reviews the metrics for setting political ambitions to explore these opportunities; further, it studies barriers to realisation of these ambitions and policies to overcome them. Finally, it reviews the approaches to policy impact evaluation and ways to diagnose the reasons for a particular level of policy performance. The paper concludes with an identification of gaps in knowledge which constrain successful realisation of the energy efficiency potential in buildings.