Conference Papers

Compliance with Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) of India can save up to 1.7 billion kWh annually. ECBC enforcement poses significant challenges to local governments who are responsible for enforcement given India’s 12th Five Year Plan’s compliance goals. This paper summarizes two important initiatives taken up in India for

making implementation and enforcement easier, leap-frogging the challenges that have been experienced in other countries.

In the first initiative, the United States Agency for International Development supported the development of the ECOnirman Whole Building Performance Tool, an online code compliance energy simulation tool. It assists developers and building designers in demonstrating performance-based compliance. It shows great promise for the future in India: it enables building developers to meet code by installing only those measures that improve their building's energy performance; it promotes innovation in design and technologies; it enables a large user-base to do energy simulations and results in true capacity building; and the database of inputs and results enables policy analysis. Tying the metered energy use of the buildings to the ECOnirman database will result in a robust dataset that will be a powerful policy tool for future programs, rating and labelling of buildings.

The other code compliance initiative is a nationwide Third Party Assessor (TPA) framework for compliance checking of ECBC. Urban Local Bodies (ULB) that enforce building and development rules and bye-laws, face technical and manpower related challenges when enforcing ECBC. This paper discusses the background research, the stakeholder engagement, and the institutional framework proposed for allowing a TPA model to be used across India.

This paper provides recommendations and next steps for ECBC compliance through future development of ECOnirman and implementation of the TPA framework.