In a strong bid to promote energy conservation in the residential sector, German KfW Development Bank is providing a loan of euro 50 million to National Housing Bank (NHB) for refinancing housing loans to buy energy efficient housing units.
KfW has pushed a similar scheme in Germany, where it provided loans to the tune of euro 40 billion for 1.8 billion “green” housing units. This helped substantively bring energy consumption down in the residential sector in Germany.
India currently has 246.7 million households but the focus of the NHB is to target households that want to purchase flats in `50-70 lakhs bracket.
Mr F. Schafhausen, deputy director-general, climate protection of the German ministry of environment, pointed out at the launch of IT-Toolkit: Resbuild India that “India and Germany must work closely to improve energy efficiency in the building sector. The toolkit can create an effective basis for making decisions to enhance technical capabilities of the users.”
The assessment tool allows the user to enter the key features of the building project to be assessed. It has been prepared along international standards ISO 13790 and is validated for different climate zones of India.
TERI director (sustainable habitat) Mili Majumdar believes, “Since 24 per cent of the energy consumption is attributed to residential building, we see huge energy saving of up to between 30 to 50 per cent with the intervention of such a tool.”
Nitish Poonia in his presentation pointed out that more and more developers were turning to building certified apartments that were showing energy efficiency of over 30 per cent over a typical residential building. Already, seven certified towers had been constructed with another 18,000 apartments receiving the green certification.
Another 2,562 apartments were in the pipeline.
The Sahara buildings in Lucknow and Nagpur had shown energy conservation of 27 and 26 per cent respectively by going in for double-walled facades and widow shading while MP Housing and HIRO, a housing board project, had shown energy saving to the tune of 37 per cent.