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Why do BPS?

Energy code compliance and certifications

Certainly, planning in accordance with current standards, labels and certificates also leads to energy-efficient buildings. However, the key to a sustainable building stock does not lie in the dogmatic fulfilment of a catalogue of requirements, but in the individual and detailed examination of the respective property and interdisciplinary planning. Anyone who follows this maxim and uses BPS to help them in the decision-making process is sure to end up with one or two ‘stamps’ and hopefully a building permission anyway.

The BPS expert will always endeavor to ensure that the decision-makers of a construction project do not aim to obtain as many certification points as possible, but to maximize the efficiency of the real building under operation conditions. He will not always succeed in this, but again and again find himself in the situation of having to gloss over or greenwash a finished design or a finished project for a given evaluation system.

Of course, it is convenient and effective for the BPS user to be able to use the same model to analyze both the sustainability criteria achieved under real operation conditions and the evaluation system relevant to the construction project. You are then free to decide whether you want to optimize according to realistic criteria and provide the necessary evidence at the end of the project development at the click on a button, or whether you ‘only’ want to achieve the highest possible score and therefore optimize according to a certification system.

In Europe, standards are based on the “European Building Performance Directive” (EBPD, see https://epb.center/epb-standards/). One overarching standard is EN ISO 52000-1 establishing a systematic, comprehensive and modular structure for assessing the energy performance of new and existing buildings (EPB) in a holistic way. Other standards that are important for the BPS are:

• EN ISO 52016-1 and EN ISO 52017-1, describing a dynamic hourly method for calculation of the thermal balance in a building for the former or energy and heating/cooling load calculation for the latter.
• EN 15316 and EN 16798 with many parts, describing calculation procedures of heating systems for the former and both ventilation and cooling systems for the latter.

These standards do formally not accept any other model than the one that is described in ISO 52016-1 and ISO 52017-1. We can say that probably no commercial energy performance simulation software matches to it, many among them doing better. The good thing here is that countries can provide national annexes to improve this situation, but so far we know only about Switzerland that has done so.

However, Standardization and Certification in Europe is still a very national issue with as many sets of rules and regulations as there are countries. E.g. in the German national annex, it is written that the EBPD standards cannot be used, as they do not match with the national laws.

In the following, we sort the national BPS related standards, rules and regulations as well as certification systems per country:

Probably the most important certification system in the world is the LEED rating system of the US Green Building Council (see https://www.usgbc.org/leed). It is based on a calculation method described in the ASHRAE 90.1 standard, that determines if the proposed building contributes points or credits toward green building certification by comparing it's simulated energy consumption against a code-minimum version (or similar baseline version) of the building. Read more about it <here>.

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