Reducing the energy consumption in the office environment

Reducing the amount of CO2-emission is an important topic during the international climate conferences. Here fore, agreements for 2020 made by the European Commission. The current share of energy consumption of the built environment is approximately 35% of the total energy consumption in The Netherlands. Whereby the ratio between the residential and non-residential buildings is around 50-50 (RVO, 2015). The share of gas in this total amount is around the 40% (Aardgas in Nederland, 2016) and the CO2-emission is around 25% of the total CO2-emission (Kadaster, 2011). Through developments and innovations in the built environment, the possibilities and capabilities have changed. Nowadays people can realize Zero Energy buildings and even Positive-energy buildings. The government is supporting the plans to realize such buildings to reduce the energy consumption and reduce the amount of CO2-emission. However, not only new buildings should be considered to reduce the energy consumption. People believe that sustainability mainly can be achieved by building new buildings, but attention to the preservation of the existing office buildings is likely to remain in the background (Agentschap, 2010).
Therefor the question raised, why wait until people revoke ZEB and PEB buildings and influence them to adjust their behavior for energy conservation, while the majority of the built environment consists of existing offices. Therefore during this research, the possibilities to influence the human behavior to reduce the energy consumption in the office environment will be researched. The question will be answered by conducting a case study in the office environment of Witteveen+Bos. The people in the office environment will be researched, in combination with the office environment and PLUSwerken, whereby the possibilities and the preferences of those people will be investigated.