a carbon footprint of an office building碳足迹的办公大楼.pdfVIP

Energies 2011, 4, 1197-1210; doi:10.3390/en4081197 OPEN ACCESS energies ISSN 1996-1073 /journal/energies Article A Carbon Footprint of an Office Building Miimu Airaksinen 1,* and Pellervo Matilainen 2 1 VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, P.O. Box 1000, FI-02044 VTT, Finland 2 Skanska ME Finland Oy, P.O. Box 114, FI-00101 Helsinki, Finland; E-Mail: pellervo.matilainen@skanska.fi * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-Mail: miimu.airaksinen@vtt.fi; Tel.: +358-40-770-4832; Fax: +358-20-722-7009. Received: 4 May 2011; in revised form: 10 August 2011 / Accepted: 17 August 2011 / Published: 19 August 2011 Abstract: Current office buildings are becoming more and more energy efficient. In particular the importance of heating is decreasing, but the share of electricity use is increasing. When the CO2 equivalent emissions are considered, the CO2 emissions from embodied energy make up an important share of the total, indicating that the building materials have a high importance which is often ignored when only the energy efficiency of running the building is considered. This paper studies a new office building in design phase and offers different alternatives to influence building energy consumption, CO2 equivalent emissions from embodied energy from building materials and CO2 equivalent emissions from energy use and how their relationships should be treated. In addition thi