However, shortage of building simulation professionals may hit the green building plans hard.
These professionals are charged with the responsibility of increasing energy efficiency, and calculating how much energy is consumed at a given point under pre-defined conditions like location and number of windows, AC load, lighting system, materials used, etc.
Though institutes like the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad (IIIT-H) and Energy Design Solutions in Delhi deal in building simulation, they train only a handful of people.
"The number of active building simulators is very less, perhaps in two digits," says Vishal Garg, faculty at the IIIT-H, involved in an academic tie-up with the CII Godrej Green Building Centre at Hyderabad for building simulation. According to him, the demand for building simulators will go up when the Energy Conservation Building Code is formulated for India, which will require all commercial buildings to comply with certain norms in terms of energy usage.
At present, many adopt a prescriptive approach in designing the green buildings ie, arbitrarily fixing the number and location of windows, ACs, motors, lightings etc for calculating the energy use. This approach, however, fails to specify the exact payback time, which is a feature of green buildings. On the other hand, building simulation give energy consumption details on an hourly basis and are hence more reliable with the payback time.
Besides, absence of any climatic data on the various building materials like bricks, tiles, cement, additives, and concrete poses another challenge in scaling up green buildings.
"There are not enough laboratories that can test and certify the building materials," says Garg, who is also associated with the project Arjun Valluri's House, a 15,000 sft independent green building in the city that has applied for the IGBC home rating.
IIIT-H together with the Bureau of Efficiency is working to promote energy efficiency. It is also working on a research project from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
The institute offers building simulation as an elective for engineering students and plans to introduce a six-month programme in building simulations.
The CII-Godrej Green Building, on its part, is now looking to tap students from colleges. It has been conducting green design competitions for students from architecture and engineering institutions. It is devising an eight-month course with IIT-H.
Besides, it is in talks with the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Ahmedabad University and Chennai University to include building simulation in the curriculum, informs CII Godrej GBC principal counsellor S Srinivas.
CII Godrej GBC recently launched the Hyderabad chapter of GBC and is in the process to increase the number of chapters to serve more regions.
