Building Distributed Energy Performance Optimization for China - a Regional Analysis of Building Energy Costs and CO₂ Emissions

Building energy accounts for about 30% of China's total annual energy consumption. China's fast urbanization makes building energy efficiency a crucial economic issue; however, only limited studies have been done that examined how to design and select suitable building energy technologies in different regions of China. This paper reports the results of a regional study of Chinese commercial and residential building energy use for optimal building energy performance. One retail and one multi-family residential prototype building are selected for this study, and their energy performance is analyzed in major Chinese cities and climate zones. To optimize each building's performance, several distributed energy resources such as combined heat and power (CHP), photovoltaics (PV), and battery storage, are considered for the selected building. Other data, for example solar radiation, electricity tariff, technology costs, and government financial incentives, are also collected for the study. The optimal building energy performance is calculated using the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM) which minimizes building energy cost or CO₂ emissions, or a combination. The trade-off between these objectives is also analyzed for the case buildings. Finally, this paper discusses suitable building energy technologies for different building types in different Chinese climate regions.