Abstract

Compliance with Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) of India can save up to 1.7 billion kWh annually. ECBC enforcement poses significant challenges to states and local governments who are responsible for enforcement especially given India’s 12th Five Year Plan’s compliance goals. This paper summarizes two important initiatives taken up in India for making energy code implementation and enforcement easier, leapfrogging the challenges that have been experienced in other countries. In the first initiative, the United States Agency for International Development supported the development of the ECOnirman Whole Building Performance Tool, the first online code compliance energy simulation tool in the world. It assists developers and building designers in demonstrating performance-based compliance. It shows great promise for the future in India: it enables building developers to meet code by installing only those measures that improve building energy performance; it promotes innovation in design and technologies; it enables a large user-base to do energy simulations and results in true capacity building; and the database of inputs and results enables easier policy analysis. Tying the metered energy use of the buildings to the ECOnirman database will result in a robust dataset that will be a powerful policy tool for behavioural programs and rating and labelling of buildings.