Development forecast and technology roadmap analysis of renewable energy in buildings in China

This paper reviewed the application of renewable energy in buildings (REIB) in China in the last decade. Based on the statistics during the 10th and 11th Five-year Plan period, the application of solar thermal, photovoltaic (PV) and ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs) in buildings for the next decade was forecasted via a transformed grey prediction model under three different development scenarios (Baseline, Reference and Aggressive Scenario). The results showed that, under Reference Scenario, 26.50 million tce (tons of standard coal equivalent) energy consumption in buildings could be replaced by renewable energy in 2015, and the share of renewable energy in building energy consumption would rise to 12.06% in 2020. However, according to domestic medium-term and long-term plans for renewable energy development, there would be some difficulties to achieve the 2015 and 2020 targets with current development trend in the construction sector. Therefore, the detailed technology roadmap of “improving the performance efficiency, expanding the technique scope and controlling the total amount of energy consumption” was thus proposed to evaluate the contribution of different technologies for achieving the medium-term and long-term targets.