China’s Building Energy Use

Buildings represent an important and increasing component of China's total energy consumption mix. However, it is difficult to assess accurately the total volume of energy consumed in buildings owing to deficiencies in China's statistical collection system and the lack of national surveys. Officially, residential and commercial energy use account for 19% of China's total consumption. This measure, though, omits many commercial and residential buildings that belong to units that are categorized under the industrial, agricultural, construction or other sectors of the economy. Chinese academics estimate that the buildings sector actually accounts for 23% of total energy use and will exceed 30% by 2010 (Liang, et al. 2007). Beyond data uncertainties, current figures exclude the energy used in the mining, extraction, harvesting, processing, manufacturing and transport of building materials as well as the energy used in the construction of buildings.

This annotated bibliography aims to review the existing major literature available in English and Chinese (including Japanese research published in Chinese) to determine the type, nature and scope of available building energy use data, including embedded energy (production of building materials and construction energy) and operations energy (enduse equipment use of energy). A wide range of sources were reviewed and include ongoing projects in China metering building energy use in the residential and commercial sectors. As well, relevant international reports on issues not covered directly in the sources about China were reviewed, including such topics as building lifetime, building material intensity, and energy use changes between dense and dispersed residential settings, among others.