Construction power - systematic energy initiatives at the construction site

Sammanfattning: Recent studies have suggested that an increasingly large proportion of a building's energy cost consists of energy consumption during the building process, before the building becomes operational. A large part of this "early energy" consists of indirect energy that has been used to manufacture building materials and components and to transport material to the construction site. Furthermore, there is the more direct energy used in construction projects such as construction electricity, district heating, LPG and diesel fuel used on-site. These costs are in a more direct and comprehensible way linked to the construction site and can be influenced by the developer and / or contractor. Therefore, this report focuses primarily on the direct energy involved during a building’s constructions phase. The problems that exist today are several. For example, both clients and contractors have very poor means of monitoring energy consumption on construction sites thus making it difficult to optimize the costs. There are no reliable statistics regarding energy usage, which makes it difficult to analyze problems and to suggest improvements. One of the reasons is that the cost of construction energy, or at least the monetary value of the potential savings, is considered to be negligible in the context of a major construction project and the subject has therefore rather low priority. Furthermore, the clients rely heavily on the contractor’s expertise and have big faith in the contractor’s ability to optimize energy usage. On the other hand, contractors assume that the customers are fully informed and aware of their own needs and that the contractor should only offer what the customer asks for, as cheaply as possible. However, it would be possible for both parties to make substantial savings by adopting a more efficient energy management. In order to achieve this, construction energy issues have to be considered early in the planning process and throughout the entire project. The best results are achieved when the developer and contractor share a common vision and there is open exchange of knowledge and experience. To facilitate this dialogue and to create a tool to address the issue early in the project, this exam-work has led to a prototype for a template that is intended to be used as a letter of intent between the parties, by which they can jointly or individually clarify and specify their energy goals within a specific project