A Review of Approaches for Building Energy Performance Certification Research

Energy performance certification (EPC) of buildings has become a research topic of high interest given the global challenges regarding sustainable development in the present century. This study aimed at conducting a systematic literature review of currently employed data collection and analysis methods for EPC research. To achieve this aim, scholarly articles published from 2002 to 2022 were obtained from the Scopus electronic database. Keywords including “energy rating”, “energy performance certification”, “energy labelling” and “methods” were combined with the Boolean operators “AND”/ “OR” and searched. Subsequently, a filtration process with exclusion criteria was adopted to select a representative sample of relevant publications for the study. These articles were then analysed to gain insights into the various methods employed by previous researchers conducting studies on the EPC of buildings. From the analysis of data collection methods, case study was the predominant technique accounting for 32.84% of publications reviewed. Other noteworthy methods were surveys (17.91%) and literature reviews (16.42%). It was further evinced that the frequently employed data analysis techniques were descriptive statistics, simulation, and multivariate data analysis techniques such as regressions. The leading computer software identified for the simulations were Design Builder, Energy Plus, TAS, and TRNSYS. The key contribution of this research is that it has unearthed the common methodological practices in EPC studies, highlighting their limitations and revealing what methods would be suitable for research towards a proposed EPC scheme for existing office buildings in Ghana, West Africa.