Buildings account for 30% of energy consumption in India, and it is estimated that 70% of the projected commercial building stock by 2030 is yet to be built. The recently established five-year US-India Centre for Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD) project aims to address the barriers for adopting low energy consuming strategies in buildings in India, while exploring the lessons that can also be applied to the US context. This paper evaluates the performance of two energy-conscious (EC) and two ‘business as usual’ (BAU) buildings in Ahmedabad, India using a combination of physical measurements, and a web-based occupant survey. The survey includes questions about Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ): thermal comfort, indoor air quality, air movement and acoustics; it also asked questions about adaptive controls such as windows and fans.
The EC buildings performed well in many categories compared to the ‘business as usual buildings’. One of the EC designed buildings in particular performed exceptionally well compared to the CBE database which consists of over 600 buildings mainly from the US but also from 9 other countries. In the other three buildings, dissatisfaction prevailed mainly with acoustic quality and office layout due to lack of speech privacy and visual privacy, but this is common across the larger database. More than 70% occupants were satisfied with thermal comfort in all except one of the BAU building and of the occupants who were uncomfortable mostly cited air movement being too low as the reason for discomfort.