This blog, it is more about the new policies taking shape in India to conserve energy.

As we’ve discussed earlier, high energy consumption is a burden on the state-run DISCOMs too. Because procuring power from generators at a high price and then giving subsidy-based pricing to all the power users to encourage economic growth isn’t an easy task, especially when there is a possibility of saving on excess usage. The Indian government realized this, especially when you never know what’s going to be happening on the global political front, putting a risk on energy supplies.

India, though it isn’t suffering like Europe now, has an increasing energy demand from all corners of the country and an urgent need to shift to renewables from coal and oil.

In this regard, India passed a law consisting of a long list of procedures, ratings and systems in order to streamline energy consumption and supply, which we feel would impact every one of us positively over the long term.

Here we go!

ECBC

We’ve discussed ECBC in one of our earlier blogs. In short, it is a stepwise procedure to make a building energy-efficient, which is driven by rating and a set of codes.

Now, the law changes this “Energy Conservation Building Code” to “Energy Conservation and Sustainable Building Code”:

This change to the “Energy Conservation and Sustainable Building Code” — specifies norms and standards for energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy and other sustainability-related requirements for different types of buildings. After this change, state governments are bound to get a larger mandate to direct owners of large commercial and residential buildings to comply with energy efficiency and conservation standards and deploy renewable energy and sustainable materials for construction.

The law proposes buildings have ECBC ratings with load capacity above 100 kW, for both commercial and residential or built commercial areas of 1000 sqm and above.

The other interesting thing the recent Energy Conservation law proposes is EPI.

Energy Performance Index Ratio (EPI Ratio) for buildings where it mandates to be less than or equal to 1 for minimal ECBC rating. And how this EPI ratio arrived?

It also proposes three types of rating:

ECBC; ECBC+; SuperECBC

The EPI ratio is used to define the building under ECBC, ECBC+ and superECBC keeping in mind the climate zones the buildings fall under. For example, buildings in the composite climate *state the cities have the following ratings to follow:

Also, it mandates a few specific buildings to procure a minimum amount of energy from renewables, stated below for super ECBC building:

*AGA here stands for referring to all living square area in a building that is above the ground. It does not include basements even if the basement is a finished walkout or daylight basement.

The law also provisions a few other important things like carbon credits, energy saving certificates (ESCs), governing council for BEE (Bureau of Energy Efficiency). The changes have been explained in the flow chart below.

With these changes being made, the Indian government expects the country to become more efficient in using Energy and making them less reliant on the exports of oil and coal, thus saving huge amounts (estimated to be INR 1.2 lac crore as per ET).

Will such a law make our buildings energy efficient and sustainable? What do you think?