1.The metering and payment system for heating in north China; 2. The quantity of energy consumed; 3.Climate characteristics.

4.1.2. Large-scale public buildings

The energy consumption in large-scale public buildings is10–15 times that in residential buildings. For example, the  floor area of large public buildings in Beijing  only accounts for 5.4% of the city’s total building floor area, however, its electricity  energy consumption is almost equal to that of residential buildings. It is obvious that  energy efficiency reform  should focus on large-scale public and government office  buildings. In order to investigate the public expectations of  energy efficiency reform,  7  the question ‘‘Can energy efficiency reform save more or less than 20% of energy  consumption?’’  has been included in the survey (see Fig. 1). The result from  government office buildings is that 40.7% of respondents vote ‘‘less’’ and 59.3%  ‘‘more’’. The result from the large-scale public buildings shows that 32% of  respondents vote ‘‘less’’  and 68% ‘‘more’’. This implies a positive opinion and high  expectation that energy efficiency reform will save energy consumption in buildings for these two types of buildings.

4.2. Energy efficient building developers

4.2.1. Property developers

According to the standard GB 50189-2005, the new buildings must save 50% of their energy consumption for heating, air conditioning and lighting comparing to buildings built in the 1980s. These new buildings are called Energy Efficient Buildings. The survey has been carried out with 411 property developers involved with the newly constructed buildings to investigate if this target has been met in the following three areas:

1.The number of EE buildings as a proportion of the total number of newly constructed buildings;  

2.The costs of EE buildings;  

3.The sales of EE buildings in the market.

The survey result reveals that only 20.6% of the total buildings have met the requirement of this standard.  The investigation shows the increment of cost of the  EE buildings. From this figure, we can see that there is a difference in the cost increments for EE buildings constructed by the different property developers. Investigation shows the market situation for EE buildings. From this, we can see that there is no overwhelming advantage for EE buildings on the property market.

This survey identifies some of the problems in developing EE buildings in China, which are:

1. There is a great mismatch between design and construction and this affects the actual energy saving;  

2. There is no stable ratio of cost increment to energy saving and this causes problems for the budget estimations for EE buildings;

3. There is no market guidance for energy efficient buildings and this causes low sensitivity to the EE buildings on the property market;  

4. Property developers underestimate the requirement of the EE buildings for property buyers.

Meanwhile, we investigated the impact of Building Energy Efficiency Labelling on purchasing intentions and the attitude of property developers to the provision of building energy efficiency labelling. The survey results show that the more information that has been supplied to the buyers, the more attention they pay to a building’s EE status.see Fig.4.The intention to ‘‘consider buying an energy efficient building’’ increases by more than five times after the provision of the information than before. There is a significant opportunity for energy efficiency building labeling to stimulate the demand for energy efficient buildings on the property market.

4.2.2. Manufacturers of materials and equipment

4.2.2. Manufacturers of materials and equipment  The investigation on the energy efficiency in building materials and products  has been carried out with 405 manufacturers throughout the country and focused on  the following  two questions: