The Energy Conservation Building Code
(ECBC) was launched in India in May 2007 under the Energy Conservation Act,
2001. It offers two compliance approaches: Prescriptive and Whole Building
Performance (WBP). According to the EC Act, compliance with the ECBC has to be
expressed in terms of Energy Performance Index (EPI) which is the annual energy
consumption per square meter of floor area, and is only possible via the WPB
compliance approach. However, as the Prescriptive compliance approach is
relatively easy to implement and enforce, it may be assumed that once ECBC is
made mandatory at local level, the Prescriptive approach will be a more widely
used compliance path over WBP owing to ease of integration with the existing
building regulations.
This paper aims to link ECBC Prescriptive requirements to the
EPI performance metric in order to bridge the gap that exists between EC Act
and ECBC Prescriptive compliance method. The simulation results help in
understanding the relative impact of ECBC Prescriptive requirements and
prioritizing the Energy Conservation Measures (ECM)s. The results are
extrapolated to understand the long term impact of the code on national energy
savings. The paper also provides an insight into the sensitivity of the various
ECMs indifferent climatic zones.