Assessing carbon emissions of an HVAC system : a
case study of SARI Building, Ahmedabad
HVAC systems represent the largest primary energy end-use in office buildings. They account for 35% of carbon emissions in an office building. Looking at the current trends in climate change, it is extremely crucial to deal with all the possibilities that will lead to a reduction in carbon emissions. For the past few decades, the building industry was not paying much attention to the embodied energy and embodied carbons of an HVAC system.The building sector is now reorienting its focus from operational emissions to whole-life emissions, which include those generated during the production, delivery, installation, and disposal of the building services equipment. Life-cycle emissions from building services and refrigerants alone, if not planned, used, and disposed of responsibly, can exceed those from today's highly scrutinized structural elements of a building.
This study will help reduce this gap in the LCA of a building to understand the embodied energy and embodied carbon involved holistically.
