Saving energy and reducing GHG has become a global trend. Our government also shows an aggressive ambition to promote it including the building sector, of which consumes 21-23% of total energy in Taiwan. Most of the government-funded programs are either to develop new technologies or to amend existing regulations. However, due to the lack of understanding of each technology to a large scale, e.g. a community, the effect of applying new regulations is sometimes unclear to the national targets. Since 2013, Taiwan EPA and the U.S. EPA and DOE have concluded three agreements on environmental protection and atmospheric monitoring. By following the agreements, this project will help establish combination of technical-economic models of regional energy systems (MARKAL) and a whole building energy simulation program (EnergyPlus) to create two Reference Building Models (RBM) to become inputs of Taiwan’s MARKAL. Eventually, the new regional energy model will provide recommended strategies and possible outcomes of Taiwan’s building sector. Four major targets in this project are: 1.Develop domestic reference building models (RBM) by using EnergyPlus. 2.Analyze building energy consumption and propose carbon reduction strategies via the reference building models. 3.Develop the CO2 mitigation model for a community with both residential and commercial buildings, and analyze carbon reduction effect based on it. 4.Keep track on the activities of related international organizations, and share experiences of carbon reduction strategies and low-carbon communities with each other.

Residential and commercial buildings;EnergyPlus model;CO2 mitigation effort assessment;Building energy efficiency measures