Title: Assessing Energy Performance Improvement Potential of Traditional Housing in North-Eastern India through Building Energy Simulation

Abstract

Abstract The building sector is a principal consumer of energy globally, and in India, the residential buildings have second highest energy demands after the industrial sector. Improving energy performance of residential houses will considerably curtail the associated carbon emissions. Compared to energy intensive urban buildings, research on energy modeling receives scant attention for small and moderate size non-engineered, traditional and naturally ventilated residential buildings constructed with low embodied energy local materials using semi-skilled construction techniques. As majority of the residential buildings in the towns and rural areas in the North-Eastern states of India are primarily constructed with such materials, the existing literature review calls for a quantitative assessment of their energy consumption patterns along with contributions of various building envelope parameters. The article aims to assess the improvement potential of the Energy Performance Index (EPI) of traditional houses in three locations viz. Agartala, Jorhat and Shillong and examine the roles of various building parameters and material options in influencing the EPI through whole building energy simulation technique followed by sensitivity analysis. The resulting optimum combinations have shown the EPI improvement (reduction) potential of 19.27 %, 21.40 %, 27.42 % over the worst cases, respectively for Agartala, Jorhat and Shillong buildings. The sensitivity analysis identified building geometry parameters such as Volume, Wall Area, Surface Area, Carpet Area and Building Height to critically influence the energy performance.