11 th International Conference on Sustainable Energy technologies (SET-2012) September 2-5, 2012 Vancouver, Canada LIFECYCLE ENERGY ANALYSIS OF A TYPICAL OFFICE BUILDING BLOCK IN MEXICO- WARM AND HUMID CLIMATE Ali M.S. Kashkooli 1* , Gloria A.Vargas 2 , Hasim Altan 3 1,2,3 School of Architecture, The University of Sheffield, Arts Tower, Western Bank, Sheffield, United Kingdom, S10 2TN 1* Corresponding Author: alik188@yahoo.com , 2 gloria.vargas@sheffield.ac.uk , 3 h.altan@sheffield.ac.uk ABSTRACT Undeniably, the huge increase of the general demand for energy to run the human activities has provided a challenge to improve energy efficiency in all levels of human life. The Building Lifecycle Assessment (BLCA) has initiated development of lots of new tools as well as the methodologies to calculate the rate of energy consumption in all phases of buildings’ construction, service-life, and disposal. The prospective BLCA methodologies have been developed into several programmes to simulate the buildings pre construction in order to reduce the waste of energy. However, the results of these methodologies are not very accurate and reliable for building design and decision-making. These are also mostly designed for developed countries without any flexibility to serve the developing countries. This study adopts a new simplified semi-quantitative BLCA methodology developed in the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom, to calculate energy (embodied, operational and total energy) for typical Mexican office-building blocks. In terms of operational energy, the method is benefitting from the use of external software called HAP (Hourly Analysis Programme), which was developed by ‘Carrier’ company. The results will reveal the advantages of the new semi-quantitative BLCA methodology and its capability of adaptation with the local programmes in calculation of overall energy; Moreover, it highlights both sensitivity and credibility of the outputs in comparison with the existing BLCA methodologies because of its flexibility with the use of updatable database and aiding from other local programmes. This methodology can be applied by designers, investors, and stakeholders in the building and construction industries to shortlist the best building alternatives in terms of materials and services. Keywords: BLCA, semi-quantitative methodology, energy, results sensitivity, simplicity and efficiency, Mexico. INTRODUCTION A Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) of construction materials and complete structures measures lifetime environmental performance from extraction to manufacturing then transportation, installation, use, maintenance and finally disposal/recycling (Athena 2009). Therefore, LCA offers an effective way to decrease waste in different stages of design, build or manufacture. In recent years, this cyclical basis has been extended to an investigation of energy (embodied and operational) and carbon (Masters 2001; Hauschild 2005; ISO14040 2006; LexicueEncycloBio 2009; Zabalza Bribián, Aranda Usón et al. 2009). In terms of sustainability and environmental impact, the performance of materials and structures in buildings should strive for minimising energy consumption and carbon footprint. However in many countries, there is no clear methodology to achieve reliable results for calculating energy consumption of building design scenarios during their lifecycle. Accordingly, the main purpose of this study is to examine the new semi-quantitative methodology (Kashkooli and Altan 2010) developed in the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield for adaptation with the case studies out of the United Kingdom. This investigation is based on calculation of energy (embodied energy (EE), Operational Energy (OE) and the total energy) in a case study in Mexico with same sun orientation but different shape. Hence, the methodology considers and benefits from local software called HAP (Hourly Analysis Programme), which was developed by ‘Carrier Corporation’ company for designing of HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Ari Conditioning) systems. This study has been carried out to examine the capability of the methodology in terms of showing the best choices of design from energy view point in other locations in the world (rather than the UK). METHODOLOGY A Simple BLCA Tool The semi-quantitative methodology (Kashkooli and Altan 2010) was developed in a PhD research investigating existing building LCA tools for the category of ‘design and decision-making support’ (Petersen 2002; Forsberga and Malmborgc 2004; Ortiz, Castells et al. 2007; Haapio and Viitaniemi 2008; Raymond and Culaba 2009) in order to establish a complete and a more sensitive measurement approach to examine case studies, based on more credible input data taken from other external sources.