The Energy Saving Effect and Economic Assessment of Office Building according to the Building Envelope Remodeling

The Korean government has introduced building regulations with improved energy conservation measures, including higher insulation levels for building envelope. However, there are many existing buildings that tend to consume more energy for heating and cooling than new buildings, as they were built under the former regulations with relatively higher U-values of walls and glazing. In order to improve energy efficiency in existing buildings, green remodelling of building envelope and building services are required. For existing buildings, building services improvements have been achieved through energy service company(ESCO), but much attention has not been paid to building envelope improvements with various reasons, such as uncertainty of energy saving effect design issues and costs. The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of building envelope improvements in a typical commercial building on its heating and cooling energy loads. The results show that the improvement of glazing with lower U-values has the highest energy saving effects, followed by wall, roof and floor, under the condition of same level of insulation improvements. However, high insulated glazing increased LCC because of higher initial investment costs.