THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The latest Global Status Report on resilient buildings put out by the UN Environment has identified the Energy Management Centre campus in Sreekaryam as one of the six major achievements in the deployment of energy-efficient technologies across the world. The EMC campus is the only building in the country that has found a place in the Global Status Report. The other five buildings are from United States, France, Sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam and Japan.
The campus, which has come up on an area of 40,000 sq ft and is skirted by tropical rain forest trees, has a way design that allows the smooth unhindered flow of wind. The design also helps the building to evade harsh equatorial sunlight. It also has high-performance building envelops or recessed windows with double walls; the UN report states that the ‘building envelop intensities’ are less than 10 kWh per square metre a year (the average is 150 kWh per sq mt a year, and for a 5-star rated building it is 45 kWh per sq mt a year). In other words, it means that the building uses considerably less energy than even a highly energy-efficient building.
The EMC campus, therefore, is one f the rare super-efficient buildings in the country. Nearly 95 percent of the built-up space is daylight illuminated. The report calls the EMC campus as an “energy positive campus”. “It was developed to allow natural cross-ventilation from building forms and openings,” the report said. The campus has a 30 kilowatt grid-connected solar capacity that exports around 50 kWh per day on average, with a doubling of the capacity under implementation. The EMC campus also uses daylighting controls, chlorofluorocarbon and ‘hydrochlorofluorocarbon’-free heating, ventilation and cooling systems, along with a halogen-free fire-fighting system.
The roof is made of high-quality materials that mitigate the harshness of the sun. It also provides natural ventilation using wind walls, solar chimneys and through displacement ventilation, which is a room air distribution strategy where conditioned outdoor air is supplied at a low velocity through turbo vents. For the construction process, certified green construction materials, recycled wood boards, low-emitting paints and adhesives, and green-plus certified carpets have been used.
