The Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC) and the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) Commercial Building Energy Performance Benchmarking Programme have established the concept of ‘Benchmark Energy Performance Index’ values (kWh/m2/year) for various building usages and climatic conditions. However, these concepts have not yet transformed the Indian building energy consumption scenario due to a lack of awareness, skilled capacity and insufficient emphasis on increasing uptake of these codes. This dearth of skilled-capacity can only be addressed, most swiftly by augmenting the existing architecture and engineering (RAC course) curricula.

Today, architecture and engineering students are not well versed with concepts of building EE, owing to a lack of comprehension of fundamental concepts of building physics, psychrometry, comfort cooling techniques & technologies, adaptive thermal comfort, etc. This lack of understanding comes from a dearth of teaching aids, innovative learning methods, and content delivery mechanisms that can significantly boost learning and the application of these concepts. As there exists a lack of awareness and/or understanding, building EE uptake has been rather slow. Therefore, even if ECBC becomes mandatory, presently, there isn’t enough workforce that will be able to adequately handle its implementation.

The Thoughtful Cooling Workshop for Architecture Professors will cover relevant subjects of sustainable design principles and technologies in order to foster ‘learning centric’ pedagogy where the generative theme is ‘how can my students learn this’ vs. ‘how will I teach this’.