Developing a Probabilistic Stock Turnover System Dynamics Model to Forecast Whole-life Energy of Chinese Urban Residential Building Stock
type: CreativeWork
description: China is a major driving force of the growth of the global building stock – in 2018 alone, 2.5 billion m2 in new buildings were constructed, amounting to 34% of the global total. In the same year, the final operational energy consumption of Chinese buildings was 504 million tonnes of oil equivalent (toe). More than one third of this energy was consumed by urban residential buildings. With a growing urban population and mounting demand for energy services in the built environment, urban residential buildings play an increasingly important strategic role in China's efforts to decarbonise its building sector. Nevertheless, there is a basic lack of authoritative data on Chinese urban residential stock. Official statistics on total floor area of the stock only exist up to 2006. The historical stock growth trajectory from 2007 onwards is therefore unknown. This creates a major barrier to understanding and analysing future trends in stock evolution or energy use. Meanwhile the embodied energy associated with the massive flow of materials consumed by the ongoing construction boom across China remains under-explored. Urban buildings in China are generally short-lived, implying a lower risk of operational energy lock-in as the stock is rapidly replenished with more efficient buildings; however, this comes at a cost of high embodied energy incurred by construction. Very limited studies have been conducted on the trade-offs between embodied and operational energy, resulting in little in the way of an evidence base to inform policymaking. This thesis fills these key research gaps, by modelling both stock turnover dynamics and the whole-life (operational and embodied) energy of Chinese urban residential buildings over the medium to long term. Whilst the thesis excludes carbon from its scope, its outputs prepare the ground for quantifying energy-related carbon emissions of the stock. A stock turnover model is developed using a System Dynamics methodology. The model captures the dy…
abstract: China is a major driving force of the growth of the global building stock – in 2018 alone, 2.5 billion m2 in new buildings were constructed, amounting to 34% of the global total. In the same year, the final operational energy consumption of Chinese buildings was 504 million tonnes of oil equivalent (toe). More than one third of this energy was consumed by urban residential buildings. With a growing urban population and mounting demand for energy services in the built environment, urban residential buildings play an increasingly important strategic role in China's efforts to decarbonise its building sector. Nevertheless, there is a basic lack of authoritative data on Chinese urban residential stock. Official statistics on total floor area of the stock only exist up to 2006. The historical stock growth trajectory from 2007 onwards is therefore unknown. This creates a major barrier to understanding and analysing future trends in stock evolution or energy use. Meanwhile the embodied energy associated with the massive flow of materials consumed by the ongoing construction boom across China remains under-explored. Urban buildings in China are generally short-lived, implying a lower risk of operational energy lock-in as the stock is rapidly replenished with more efficient buildings; however, this comes at a cost of high embodied energy incurred by construction. Very limited studies have been conducted on the trade-offs between embodied and operational energy, resulting in little in the way of an evidence base to inform policymaking. This thesis fills these key research gaps, by modelling both stock turnover dynamics and the whole-life (operational and embodied) energy of Chinese urban residential buildings over the medium to long term. Whilst the thesis excludes carbon from its scope, its outputs prepare the ground for quantifying energy-related carbon emissions of the stock. A stock turnover model is developed using a System Dynamics methodology. The model captures the dy…
author: Zhou, Wei
language: eng
keywords: Stock Turnover, System Dynamics, Building Stock, Whole-life Energy, Uncertainty
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2021-07-01
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:24Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.80222