The inherent building energy-cost relationship: An analysis of thirty Melbourne case studies

This study investigates the energy and cost performance of thirty recent buildings in Melbourne, Australia. Commonly, building design decisions are based on issues pertaining to construction cost, and consideration of energy performance is made only within the context of the initial project budget. Even where energy is elevated to more importance, operating energy is seen as the focus and embodied energy is nearly always ignored. For the first time, a large sample of buildings has been assembled and analysed to improve the understanding of both energy and cost performance over their full life cycle. The aim of this paper is to determine the relationship between energy and cost using regression analysis for a range of building functional types.The conclusion is that energy and cost are strongly correlated,independent of building area, and equations are presented for future modelling of energy using cost as the independent variable.