Recent Advances in Sustainable Buildings: Review of the Energy and Cost Performance of the State-of- the-Art Best Practices from Around the World

This article reviews the design approaches and technologies that have been used to reduce the energy requirements of new buildings by a factor of 2 to 4 compared to the energy use of otherwise comparable recent new buildings or that have been used to achieve comparable savings in retrofits of existing buildings. This is followed by a critical discussion of documented studies of the energy performance of new and retrofitted buildings from around the world, along with cost information whereever available. The additional costs of meeting the Passive Standard for heating loads in new buildings, which represents a factor of 5 to 10 reduction of heating load compared to current standard practice, have ranged from 0% to 16% of the construction costs of reference buildings. High-performance commercial buildings, with overall energy intensities of 25-50% that of recent conventional buildings, have been built at less cost, or only at a few percent more cost, than conventional buildings.