ABSTRACT

With the impact of climate change, the use of both energy and resources that lock in future energy use is receiving heightened attention. New Zealand has lagged behind many similar countries in not requiring an explicit energy certification for dwellings. This paper reviews the form of energy certification used by similar countries and discusses the potential impact of applying the various forms to New Zealand dwellings. Specifically, it compares how different forms of comparison, or normalisation, value the features of a home and implicitly rate which dwellings are considered ‘like’ each other. Of the 85 buildings compared none received consistent rankings across all the normalisation methods and only one was in the ‘better’ half of the data under all nine of the normalisation methods used. Some of the forms of normalisation systematically advantaged large dwellings, and others small dwellings. Since normalisation methods can be chosen to value certain aspects of dwelling design, there needs to be a discussion about what we value in dwellings in order to determine which method(/s) would be appropriate for New Zealand. The main purpose of this paper is to alert social scientists of the need to have this value-based discussion.

摘要

随着气候变化的影响，锁定未来能源使用的能源和资源的使用正受到越来越多的关注。新西兰在不需要明确的住宅能源认证方面落后于许多类似国家。本文回顾了类似国家使用的能源认证形式，并讨论了将各种形式应用于新西兰住宅的潜在影响。具体来说，它比较了不同形式的比较或标准化如何评估房屋的特征，并隐含地评估哪些住宅被认为彼此“相似”。在所比较的 85 座建筑物中，没有一座在所有标准化方法中获得一致的排名，只有一座在所使用的所有九种标准化方法的数据中处于“较好”的一半。一些标准化形式系统地有利于大型住宅，而另一些则有利于小型住宅。由于可以选择标准化方法来评估住宅设计的某些方面，因此需要讨论我们在住宅中的价值，以确定哪种方法适合新西兰。本文的主要目的是提醒社会科学家需要进行这种基于价值的讨论。