Cooling Load Reduction strategies for Residential Buildings - A life cycle cost perspective

Abstract

Buildings consume tremendous amounts of energy for space cooling. Particularly, during the summer season, this consumption escalates, creating an overall sustainability concern. Several active and passive green building strategies have been proposed and successfully utilized, resulting in reduction in cooling load. However, the upfront cost associated with these strategies repels their adoption and decision makers often end up buying solutions which have huge operations and maintenance cost. This demands to have a life cyclic view of financial implications of green building strategies to manage cooling load. Therefore, the current study assimilates several green building active and passive strategies and simulates their thermal performance, obtaining the most optimum cooling load configuration. It is found that strategies grouped in Scenario 8 offer the minimum cooling load. Furthermore, life cycle cost analysis of each scenario is estimated and overall efficiency is evaluated to identify the most productive space cooling configuration. The results suggest that Scenario 13 has the minimum life cycle cost and presents the overall most optimum set of strategies. The findings will help the decision makers in selecting the most load-efficient and cost-effective green building strategies to help improve overall sustainability.