POTENTIAL OF ENERGY CONSERVATION THROUGH RENOVATION OF EXISTING HDB IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

With the economic development and people’s living standard increasing in Singapore, energy consumption of buildings especially in the residential sector has been increasing. Energy consumption of buildings takes up about a third of Singapore’s total electricity production, and of which 19% is consumed by the residential sector alone. (Energy Market Authority, 2010) To respond to that high expense, people has been trying to reduce the energy consumption of buildings by designing and constructing greener and more sustainable buildings over the last decades, and this also leads to the launch of Green Mark scheme in 2005 in Singapore which establish measuring standards to examine the energy performance of any buildings built thereafter. Instead of studying the various methods of designing and constructing sustainable buildings, this dissertation focuses on renovations of the existing residential buildings especially HDB flats in Singapore and explores the potential of energy conservation through renovation. Existing buildings here are referred as the buildings designed and constructed before the Green Mark Scheme was executed. With a thorough review of various literatures, the household energy use in Singapore is analyzed. By carefully examine the physical and occupational aspects of HDB household characteristics, the dissertation first establishes a precise household profile which generates similar simulation results of energy consumption of existing HDB household as those shown in the past research. Once the suitable digital model is created, the next step is to apply various renovation plans to the model ready for simulation. The simulation results are thoroughly analyzed to produce the optimum plan of renovation for the existing HDB flats.