Sustainable Construction, 5th Edition

Chapter 9Building Energy Efficiency Strategies

Of all the challenges facing the development of high-performance green buildings, significantly reducing the energy and carbon footprints of the built environment is perhaps both the most important and the most daunting. This chapter addresses the design of low-energy buildings and strategies for carbon footprint reduction are covered in Chapter 12. The environmental impacts of extracting and consuming nonrenewable energy resources, such as fossil and nuclear fuels, are profound. These represent the major contribution to climate change—and there are also impacts from coal and uranium mining, acid rain, nitrous oxides, particulates, radiation, ash disposal problems, and long-term storage of nuclear waste—are just some of the consequences of energy consumption by the built environment. Building energy consumption in the United States is at about the same scale as energy consumption by automobiles, with about 40 percent of primary energy being consumed by buildings and about the same quantity by transportation.¹ In fact, much automotive energy consumption is affected by the distribution of buildings on the landscape.

Ultimately fossil fuel reserves are finite because the planet is finite in size. Considerable additional energy and financial resources will be needed to extract Earth's fossil fuel resources. Over the long term, economies around the world will continue to grow, all of them dependent on abundant, cheap energy, none of ...