But before India initiates designing ZCB programmes, we need to assess preparedness. Globally, policy frameworks to promote ZCBs consist of three major elements: a measurable commitment, buildings and appliance and efficiency, and clean energy generation.

Even though India has not yet made ZCBs a national goal, existing policies and regulations make ZCBs a feasible and politically attainable. The revised and new Energy Conservation Building Codes (ECBC) launched for commercial and residential buildings respectively, mandatory Minimum Energy Performance Standards (MEPs) for most energy-intensive appliances and most recently, a star labelling programme for residential buildings, all lay the ground to promote energy efficiency in all types of buildings. At the sub-national level, several states have net metering to promote on-site renewables and open access regulations which allow commercial and industrial buildings of a certain demand size to procure off-site renewable generation. But to hit zero-carbon goals these policies will need to be strengthened and implementation accelerated.

Our continuing work in Kochi has given us the opportunity to observe the existing framework of national-level policies from both a micro and macro perspective. Based on our experience, we identified four areas where India needs to act now to start developing a pathway to zero-carbon buildings.

To establish energy usage benchmarks and track building-specific energy use and carbon emissions, utility data on electricity needs to be integrated with building or property IDs. While Kochi digitised much of this information in 2018, we found that a lot of this data was not linked with each other. Many global cities have programmes that encourage or require disclosure of energy usage to the building owners and cities benchmark energy usage. India should establish a national voluntary programme and cities should consider mandatory benchmarking requirements.

Preliminary findings from modelling baseline and ECBC compliance scenarios for new commercial buildings in Kochi indicated that achieving zero carbon at building level is technically challenging unless policies are changed. Net-metering regulations that restrict the size of rooftop solar PV either based on the connected load or the transformer size pose limitations to on-site generation. And open-access to purchase renewables from outside the building’s boundaries is currently available only to commercial and industrial buildings. Additionally, building codes must be strengthened to accommodate ZCB requirements.

For buildings such as hotels and hospitals with very high energy loads, achieving zero-carbon may be technically possible but economically unfeasible because of the nature of their business, operation and scale. Our interactions with Kochi’s stakeholders highlighted this issue. For such cases, creating zero-carbon wards (of buildings located in the same area) or portfolios (of buildings owned by the same entity) would allow for economic efficiency through achieving negative emissions in some buildings where it is easier to offset slightly higher emissions from others where it is more difficult.

Globally, municipalities and utilities are adapting to newer, more collaborative approaches to design and implement building efficiency programmes. In India, both entities are traditional and risk-averse but need to change to address calls to focus on the quality of service, including how to achieve better energy service with reduced consumption and help to slow and respond to climate change. Currently, municipalities limit their work to handling building permits for new construction and enforcing by-laws, but they don’t engage with energy implications of these decisions. They need to be empowered and equipped to act through strong leadership and investments in capacity building.

Localisation and construction techniques:

Beyond operational emissions, the construction sector should begin considering the embodied carbon associated with the production of the materials it uses, as this will become an increasingly large portion of the carbon footprint of a building as operational emissions are decreased. The Nirmithi Kendras in Kerala have been working on promoting local building materials that have lower embodied carbon intensity, and alternative construction techniques.

According to these agencies, there are suppliers for these materials, but builders prefer lower-cost conventional Reinforced Cement Concrete (RCC) in constructions. Public procurement guidelines must be revised to include mandatory use of these materials for government buildings. The capacity of material providers and developers across India should Nirmithi Kendras must be built to improve standardisation and encourage adoption of lesser-known low carbon materials in the state

ZCBs are feasible in India and every other country now, but there is still much work to be done to make sure that national and city ambitions and policies are aligned with making sure that local construction and real estate markets are evolving to deliver these buildings in accordance with the urgent timeline of climate imperative.