During our ongoing training program on Energy Simulation of Buildings for LEED and ECBC at IIIT Hyderabad these days (Dec. 16-19, 2010), again some participants raised the point of high embodied energy in high performance glazing solutions.
I feel that due to lack of data regarding embodied energy, there is much hype getting generated against high performance glazing. People are releasing statements saying that such glass is not able to pay the energy invested in making itself through energy savings.
Some preliminary analysis has shown that the share of embodied energy in the entire life cycle energy of a building is less than 3% since over the life of about 40 years, operational energy is much more than embodied energy that is invested one time only.
We are doing detailed analysis of this topic to help the building sector understanding the correlation between the two, this would help in establishing the usefulness of high performance glazing.
In fact with this intent only we visited few glass manufacturing units in India, but manufacturers are little hesitant in releasing the data. We are trying to convince them that such analysis will help them and would not be going against then in any way. This would remove the mental blockage present in the building sector against extensive use of good glass.
Let us see how and when can we convince them and get the data.
No comments:
Post a Comment