Indoor environmental quality and energy use evaluation of a three-star green office building in China with field study

Abstract

In order to get more comprehensive operation performance on indoor environment quality (IEQ) and energy consumption, a long-time measurement and a field occupants’ satisfaction survey on IEQ performance of the first three-star-operation-certified green office building in Ningbo city of China have been conducted, and environmental energy efficiency (EEE) also has been analyzed. Moreover, IEQ and energy consumption of the green case office building are compared with other green office example buildings of the same climate zone in other literatures. The results show that the actual indoor thermal environment of the green case office building isn’t quite achieving the design goals with the Chinese standard of thermal comfort level II (GB 50736). Although indoor air quality of CO₂ concentration and visual environment are consistent with the design goals, the indoor relative humidity doesn’t reach the design goal in most of the year. The questionnaire survey results illustrate that the green case building has a high occupants’ satisfaction on IEQ. The comparison results show that there is no obvious difference in indoor temperature and visual environment between the green case building and the green office example buildings in other studies. The results of occupant’s satisfaction and CO₂ concentration of the green case building are better than in other studies. However, the indoor relative humidity of the green case building in every season is much higher than in other researches. Energy use intensity (EUI) of the green case building is about 56.5 kWh/m²·a, which is much lower than the constraint value of the Chinese standard. The actual performance of the green case building is also evaluated by the indicator of EEE. The results of this article can provide useful reference for green building operational performance promotion and feedback for design phase optimization.