Impacts of Building Microenvironment on Energy Consumption in Office Buildings: Empirical Evidence from the Government Office Buildings in Guangdong Province, China

Abstract

Social progress and economic development has resulted in the need to focus on the impacts of building microenvironment on the energy consumption in office buildings. The concept of a building’s microenvironment was introduced to understand the local microclimate around a building that is formed by the surrounding urban green spaces, the distribution of roads, and building proximity. For this research, we adopted a regression analysis to quantify the impacts of building microenvironment on energy consumption in office buildings. Taking the government office buildings of Guangdong Province as an example, we measured the building microenvironment through the urban green space density, road density, and number of points of interest (POI) around the buildings. The results showed that when the green space density increased by one unit, the energy consumption in government office buildings was reduced by 0.277%. Moreover, an increase of 1% in road density and in the number of POI increased the energy consumption in government office buildings by 0.288% and 0.048%, respectively. Furthermore, we discussed the heterogeneous impacts of building microenvironment on the energy consumption in government office buildings at varying scale levels. Green space and road density had less impact on the energy consumption in larger buildings, whereas the number of POI had no significant impact on small-scale buildings but did have a significant impact on large-scale buildings. There were also some limitations in the study. The data were limited to government office buildings, and did not include panel data, as well as it lacked building characteristics such as orientation, floor height, and building materials. In addition, it was impossible to evaluate the impacts of meteorological factors such as wind speed and thermal radiation on energy consumption in buildings. Nonetheless, our study demonstrates that energy-aware urban planning and design have the potential to unlock energy efficiency for cities worldwide.