Argentina. Since 2013 Rosario has state-of-the-art regulations that promote energy efficiency when building new buildings.
In May of that year, Monica Fein signed Decree 985, thus regulating Ordinance 8,757, which the City Council had unanimously approved two years earlier, at the end of April 2011. Since its entry into force to date, building permits were enabled for more than 350 thousand square meters that implement different mechanisms to achieve electricity and gas savings. With that accumulated experience, now the city will be taken as a model at the national level: the Casa Rosada seeks to develop a real estate labeling system to categorize houses and apartments according to their characteristics and behavior in lighting and air conditioning.
The project of the national government is characterized by being similar to the so-called labeling of household appliances, which categorizes for example refrigerators and refrigeration equipment with the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and J and green, yellow, orange and red colors according to the savings – or not – of energy that they guarantee with respect to a standardized equipment by the National Institute of Industrial Technology.
The idea is to categorize the properties in a similar way, recognizing the greater or lesser energy efficiency, which translates into savings in electricity and gas.
In the same way as the equipment taken into account by the Inti to assign by comparison the labels with colors that must be visible on the doors of the refrigerators, Rosario will be taken as a prototype city for the implementation of energy efficiency policies in buildings, both collective homes and offices or public buildings.
Ordinance 8,757 in force created the Sustainable Constructions and Energy Efficiency Program. It launched a series of requirements to builders on compliance with indicators that evaluate the performance of buildings in terms of their envelope (facades, roofs and boundary walls of buildings). Today, this requirement that is required at the time of applying for building permits already applies, on average for square meters, to about 350 buildings of 7 floors.
To this end, the procedure that forms the body of the ordinance was agreed with all parties to the construction activity, adding professional associations, business chambers, educational institutions, control agencies, among others. The chosen mechanism consists of increasing the demands as they meet different stages. Thus, in 2013 the requirement fell on projects that exceeded 4,000 square meters, in 2014 those of 3,000, in 2015 those of 2,000, and this year it already reaches those of 1,000 square meters. By 2017, projects of more than 500 square meters will have to comply with the regulations, and in 2018 all, without exceptions.
The effect that anyone can verify is that since the regulations were implemented large buildings can not contain openings with simple and unprotected glass, they must have roller curtains or shutters, walls and ceilings must contain thermal insulation so that both heat and cold can be controlled more effectively, cushioning temperature differences and generating cooler cabins in summer and with less heat loss in winter.
