Estimating India’s commercial building stock to address the energy data challenge

Estimating the commercial building stock in terms of energy and area usage can be a tricky exercise in the absence of reliable and structured data. While the benefits of such an exercise are widely understood in some countries, no standard framework works in all countries due to the differences in workforce capacity and resources, national priorities, and energy data and analytics maturity of various countries. Hence, this paper documents an energy-accounting exercise that first collects commercial building sector data in India from multiple sources. An approach is then proposed that first divides the commercial building sector into categories and subcategories and then estimates the floor area (1.1 billion m2) and energy intensity (69 kWh/m2) of the entire commercial stock in 2017. Based on macro-economic parameters, the floor area (1.78 billion m2) and energy intensity (81 kWh/m2) are projected for 2027 in a business-as-usual scenario. This research sends a clear signal to other researchers and policy-makers in the central and state government about the need and potential to refine and adopt more rigorous data-collection and analytical methods by institutionalizing the process and advancing data-driven policies and evaluation in future.