Introduction of Energy Foundation China Sustainable Cities Program

To start the green building work comprehensively; to investigate the technology application, industrial development and work progress of green buildings in Chongqing; to clear and definite the development status of green buildings; to further clarify the development idea of green buildings in Chongqing; to put forward scientific and feasible development planning of green buildings in Chongqing; to promote the effective progress of green building work in Chongqing and to plan to launch development planning research of green buildings in Chongqing.

The national demonstration project of renewable energy building in Huazhong University of Science and Technology, approved by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, is achieved to build up a teaching or office building with renewable energy use to adjust temperature and comfortableness all year in Hot-summer & Cold winter area. There is used the Active Dynamic Air Envelope with air inter-layer. Fully use the advantage of underground temperature balance in a year and utilize renewable energy to adjust the flesh air temperature. The Underfloor Air Distribution System is including circle water with underground cool or hot source, underfloor radiator and flesh air vent. The used power of comfort adjusting system is equal or smaller than generated solar energy all year from photovoltaic cell on building roof. This project will store up solar hot in autumn and air cool in spring into underground for anti-reason use.

The project aims at quantifying the method of energy efficiency and CO2 emission reduction of cool roof in urban regional of China, and providing the theory and data support.

Large-scale application of river water source heat pumps in buildings.The research involves the research and analysis on river water resources (including Yangtze River, Jialing River, Wujiang River, etc.) in Chongqing, to make clear the quantity, quality and distribution characteristics of river water resources, analyze their availability and usable amount, provide suggestions on the appropriate zone, guarantee mechanism and incentive measures for the planning implementation based on geographical features, climatic environment, local resources, forms of building structures and other characteristics of Chongqing, and sequentially provide a guarantee for promoting the technology promotion and application of river water source heat pumps in Chongqing as well as improve the quality of energy utilization for air conditioning and reduce the energy consumption.

This paper summarizes a sizable literature that traces China’s rapid economic growth and the associated environmental problems to its unique and fundamental institutions, and discuss the implications of this on how China might grow more sustainably.

Energy Foundation Annual Report 2011

The construction of affordable housing is a major task of the national “twelfth five-year” plan of construction industry. In order to guarantee the quality of construction and build an ecological low-carbon city, Shenzhen requires that all affordable houses must be constructed in line with the green building standards, and achieve the bronze grade or above which specified by “Regulations on assessment of green buildings in Shenzhen”.

According to "China Rural Statistical Yearbook of 2006", annual household energy consumption for life in rural areas in 30 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions) in China has reached 320 million tce, accounting for 20% of total building energy consumption in China. Promoting building energy-saving work northern rural areas is critical to the result of China’s overall building energy efficiency and is related to national energy strategies and sustainable economic and social development.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has a long history of promoting energy efficiency in China. With generous support from the Energy Foundation, NRDC established a Demand Side Management (DSM) Technical Center in Beijing at the end of 2008. The DSM Technical Center is an integral part of NRDC’s and the China Sustainable Energy Program’s (CSEP) goal to help China scale up its capacity to design, administer, implement, and evaluate cost effective energy efficiency programs. The DSM Technical Center is designed to serve as the go-to resource in helping China’s central and provincial governments realize their energy efficiency goals. In 2009, the DSM Technical Center mainly focused on its own internal capacity building to bring staff members up to speed on DSM program best practices and U.S. implementation experiences. In 2010, the DSM Technical Center began building on the advancements of previous years to provide hands-on technical assistance, trainings, and policy implementation support in selected provinces and municipalities in China, specifically Hebei, Jiangsu, Sichuan, Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing. In 2011, the DSM Technical Center continued its efforts to support the selected provinces and municipalities, and, in particular, reached out to grid companies to help build technical capacity to implement utility-led DSM programs. The DSM Technical Center has also become a more accessible source of information to the Chinese audience by adopting various forms of outreach strategies in 2011. Our goal was to help scale up DSM and efficiency power plant (EPP) implementation in China. This report provides a detail of our activities under Grant 1011-13558 from March 1-December 31, 2011.