Benchmarking energy efficiency standards for residential buildings in China

China government sets out "Building Energy Efficiency Management Ordinance" targeting for a 50% reduction of energy consumption for buildings. Regulatory control was also especially adopted to cut down the energy consumption in residential buildings. In Hong Kong, Energy Efficiency Office (EEO) drew up a comprehensive set of codes of practice for energy efficiency in commercial building sectors. For residential sectors only a voluntary building environmental-performance assessment scheme HK-BEAM is being implemented. In order to benchmarking the energy efficiency standards for residential buildings in China, HK-BEAM was chosen as compliance criteria for assessment. With the use of the energy budget approach, the annual energy consumption of a baseline building prescribed in China Codes and HK-BEAM were evaluated by HTB2 and BECRES software. The OTTV of the residential building was also calculated by modified OTTVCAL. The results showed that when complying with China code the residential building OTTV is lower, but the annual energy consumption and cooling load is higher than HK-BEAM. The annual energy use difference amounts to 1.42%. All the compliance criteria except the ventilation rate and equipment power characteristics in China code are set higher than HK-BEAM and result in lower energy budget for residential buildings. But the compliance criteria of the ventilation rate and equipment power characteristics cause more energy consumption, especially the ventilation rate.