Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 238, 20 November 2019, 117908
Journal of Cleaner Production

Assessing the effects of technological progress on energy efficiency in the construction industry: A case of China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.117908Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Explored energy efficiency of the building production process through analysis of national statistical data.

  • Technological progress was found to increase energy efficiency by an annual average of 7.1%.

  • Analyzed the roles of technological progress factors in improving energy efficiency.

Abstract

Energy-saving technologies in buildings have received great attention from energy efficiency researchers in the construction sector. Traditional research tends to focus on the energy used during building operation and in construction materials production, but it usually neglects the energy consumed in the building construction process. Very few studies have explored the impacts of technological progress on energy efficiency in the construction industry. This paper presents a model of the building construction process based on Cobb-Douglas production function. The model estimates the effects of technological progress on energy efficiency with the objective to examine the role that technological progress plays in energy savings in China's construction industry. The modeling results indicated that technological progress improved energy efficiency by an average of 7.1% per year from 1997 to 2014. Furthermore, three main technological progress factors (the efficiency of machinery and equipment, the proportion change of the energy structure, and research and development investment) were selected to analyze their effects on energy efficiency improvement. These positive effects were verified, and results show the effects of first two factors are significant. Finally, recommendations for promoting energy efficiency in the construction industry are proposed.

Introduction

Energy is generally regarded as a vital factor of production in various sectors (Zha and Zhou, 2014). Due to increasing environmental problems and energy security issues, exploring energy efficiency and energy intensity in high energy-consuming industries has become a dominant topic worldwide. “Energy efficiency” is often used as a generic term that refers to approaches or technologies that use less energy to produce the same amount of services or useful output (Patterson, 1996). The International Energy Agency (IEA) defines energy efficiency as “a way of managing and restraining the growth in energy consumption.” On the other hand, energy intensity (namely, energy consumption per unit of GDP) is a binding target for national economic and social development (Chen et al., 2019), and it provides indirect evidence for formulating targeted energy efficiency policy, especially at the technological and engineering levels (Proskuryakova and Kovalev, 2015). Energy intensity data were used as a generalized integral measure of long-term feedback to energy efficiency. Generally, energy efficiency is the reciprocal of energy intensity (Li and Lin, 2014; Voigt et al., 2014). As shown in Fig. 1, the first three high energy-consuming sectors in China over 18 years are the manufacturing industry (MI), household energy consumption (HEC) (mainly from the building operation's energy consumption), and transportation industry (TI). Many energy efficiency research studies related to those three sectors have been conducted (Xu and Lin, 2016; Zha et al., 2017).

Some industries are usually neglected due to their small ratio of energy consumption; for example, the construction industry (CI). However, energy demand in the construction industry is likely to increase significantly. China is undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization (Wang et al., 2014), and substantial energy demands continue to exist in different sectors. Fig. 2 illustrates the growth rates of nine industries' energy consumption in China from 1997 to 2014.1 During that time, the construction industry showed the fastest average annual growth rate (9.78%). That means that construction of a large number of new buildings consumes a great deal of energy in the construction industry every year. According to Qiu Baoxing, the China's vice-minister of construction, an annual addition of 1.5 billion to 2 billion square meters (m2) of new building stock is probable in China (Fernández, 2007). In addition, tall buildings are being constructed in China, accompanied by massive energy consumption from high energy-consuming machinery and equipment. According to the report on Tall Trends of 2018 from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (Skyscrapercenter, 2018), China recorded 88 completions of Tall Buildings, the most by a single country (Skyscrapercenter, 2018).

From the perspective of building life-cycle energy use, Fig. 3 illustrates the energy use scopes in the construction sector. Total life-cycle energy use is the sum of life-cycle embodied energy and operating energy. The operating energy is conventionally found to be greater than a building's total life-cycle embodied energy (e.g., 54%–98% and 2%–46%, respectively) (Azari and Abbasabadi, 2018). However, as buildings have become increasingly energy efficient, and as even net-zero energy buildings emerge, the share of embodied energy is expected to increase (Zeng and Chini, 2017).

Embodied energy is relatively complex. It is composed of the initial embodied energy, recurrent embodied energy, and demolition energy, as shown in Fig. 3. The initial embodied energy is the total energy used to extract raw materials, manufacture and transport products and components, and construct a building. Furthermore, it has two components—direct and indirect energy consumption (Ibn-Mohammed et al., 2013). Direct energy is the energy associated with constructing the building and transporting building components on the site. In other words, it is the energy related to various on-site operations like construction, transportation, and administration. Indirect energy is the energy used to acquire, process, and manufacture the building materials. Malmqvist et al. (2018) concluded that embodied energy of the construction stage varies between 6% and 38% of the total embodied energy, as shown in Fig. 3. Due to the much smaller proportion of life-cycle embodied energy and the data availability issues, research on the direct energy consumption on the construction site is often easily neglected (Liu and Lin, 2016; Malmqvist et al., 2018).

To sum up, as the shares of embodied energy are expected to increase (Dimoudi and Tompa, 2008) and China is undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization, the energy consumption of the building production process is becoming an important research issue. However, energy consumption in the construction industry is often neglected and has few studies. Therefore, to bridge the research gap, this study focused on energy consumption in the construction industry, using national statistical data.

Reducing the growth rate of energy consumption can be achieved by improving energy efficiency (Huang et al., 2017b). Improvements in energy efficiency has considerably slowed energy consumption growth (Fisher-Vanden et al., 2004). However, energy efficiency can be determined by different variables (e.g., the energy consumption structures, the price of energy, technological progress). Specifically, energy efficiency improvements result from ongoing technological progress, response to rising energy prices, and competitive forces to cut costs. More important, some research has shown that technological progress has a stronger impact on energy efficiency than other factors do (Huang et al., 2017a). Huang et al. (2018) examined the effects of technological progress (including indigenous and foreign innovation) on energy intensity in China. In practice, one of the most common relationships between energy efficiency and technological progress is the government's energy saving policies. These policies generally rely on using technological progress to achieve energy savings because technological progress is an effective means by which to improve energy efficiency (Appendix A). As a consequence, exploring the impacts of technological progress on energy efficiency in the construction industry can be an effective and reliable measure for reducing embodied energy in the industry (Lin and Liu, 2015a; Noailly, 2012).

This study focused on the impacts of technological progress on energy efficiency in the construction industry from the perspective of the building production process, which is analogous to the industrial product production process. The construction company is the manufacturer of building products, and the production of those products occurs on the construction sites. The construction company's energy consumption is mainly from the machines and equipment on sites (trucks, loaders, cranes, pumping and welding machines, etc.), offices and living at the construction site (lighting, cooking, heating, cooling, etc.), and some experiments and maintenance.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. A review of the literature is provided in Section 2, and the methodology is introduced in Section 3. In Section 4, the results and discussions are presented, and the conclusions are reported in Section 5.

Section snippets

Literature review

Economic data for the last two centuries have demonstrated the presence of a self-sustaining mechanism of cumulative productivity growth known as technological progress or technological change. In mathematical economics, technological progress refers to a combination of all effects that lead to increased production output without increasing the amounts of the productive inputs (e.g., capital, labor, and resources) (Hritonenko and Yatsenko, 2013). As for the measurement of technological change,

Cobb-Douglas production function (CDPF)

Technology is commonly described through the relationship between inputs and outputs in general equilibrium within top-down models. In economics, the CDPF is widely used to represent the relationship between product outputs and resource inputs (e.g., capital and labor). Hence, this function has been used widely in research on technological progress (Sircar and Choi, 2009). The application of this function is involved mainly in the industrial production field for a firm, sector, or industry in a

Results

The effect of technological progress on energy consumption in the Chinese construction industry is calculated as follows.Y(t)=AectK(t)αL(t)βE(t)γ

After employing a natural logarithm transformation, (5a), (5b) can be expressed in a linear from, as shown in formula (12):lnY=lnA+ct+αlnK+βlnL+γlnE

According to α + β + γ  = 1, the following is obtained:β=1-α-γ

Then, the following is obtained by combining formulas (13) and (14):lnYlnL=lnA+ct+α(lnKlnL)+γ(lnElnL)+ε

Formula (14) represents a multiple

Conclusions

In this study, a modified model of buildings construction process was first presented to estimate the effects of technological progress on energy efficiency in the construction industry. The research results indicate that technological progress improved energy efficiency by an average of 7.1% per year from 1997 to 2014. Next, the roles of technological progress factors on energy efficiency were analyzed and verified. The first factor, the efficiency of machinery and equipment, plays a major

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the China National Key R&D Program (Grant No. 2018YFC0704400) for providing financial support for this project.

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