A four-storey home in Delhi or elsewhere can run on minimum thermal power from the grid if the new guidelines for energy efficient homes issued by the ministry of new and renewable energy are implemented.
A four-storey home in Delhi or elsewhere can run on minimum thermal power from the grid if the new guidelines for energy efficient homes issued by the ministry of new and renewable energy (MNRE) are implemented.
The voluntary guidelines for the residential sector in hot and humid areas recommends 15 energy efficient features for homes including installation of solar rooftop panels and solar water heaters that can substantially reduce energy requirement annually.
“If all the features are incorporated in homes up to four-storey buildings the requirement of energy from external sources would be bare minimum,” said Sameer Maithel, who had developed the guidelines under Indo-Swiss Building Energy Efficient Project. “Taller buildings will require more thermal power as roof-top solar generation capacity will remain limited”.
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Implementing some of the measures like proper ventilation, use of light colour on walls and proper wall-to-window ratio would result in substantial savings on power consumption. About 20% of the cooling energy can be saved if internal and external walls have light colours and windows have extended overhangs. Use of insulation on walls and double glaze glass panes could result in saving of up to 50% electricity needed for cooling.
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Implementing some of the measures like proper ventilation, use of light colour on walls and proper wall-to-window ratio would result in substantial savings on power consumption. About 20% of the cooling energy can be saved if internal and external walls have light colours and windows have extended overhangs. Use of insulation on walls and double glaze glass panes could result in saving of up to 50% electricity needed for cooling.
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Ajay Mathur, director general of Bureau of Energy Efficiency — the statutory office for energy efficiency in India — said the cooling requirement of a room in a middle class home will go down from a 1.5 tonne air conditioner to a one tonne AC if the measures for one’s bedroom are adopted. And it would translate into about 30 to 50% less energy consumption for cooling.
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A big bottleneck for implementing the guideline was removed by Delhi Electricity Regulatory Authority (DERC) on Tuesday — the day the guidelines were launched — by announcing net metering system for Delhi.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
