Evaluation of Energy Concepts for Office Buildings

Glass façades" have become a synonym for innovative office buildings in Germany over the last 10 years.Since almost no reliable results of measurement and verification have been made public on the performance of these buildingsoften very prominent company headquarters -an expert and public discussion arouse as to whether these buildings can operate energy efficiently or if they can provide for a good user comfort at all.Therefore the IGS -Institute for Building and Solar Technology started the EVA-project to evaluate the performance of a typical sample of five of these buildings as well as a sample of conventional office buildings.This paper surveys the projects methodologies and buildings.Results of the first phase that documented the participating buildings and analysed existing data on energy consumption suggest that glassed office buildings do not generally have a significantly higher energy consumption than regular office buildings.