Whole life costing: Towards a sustainable built environment

Whole life costing (WLC) is a technique used to examine the direct and indirect costs of a constructed asset. Despite having been widely practised in other industries, its importance in the construction industry has been long overlooked. The barriers which prevent WLC being implemented by the construction industry include insufficient knowledge of implementing WLC, the unavailability of reliable cost and time related data and the inconsistencies in the underlying methodology for WLC. Only recently, increased concern over climate change and economic crisis has led to the recognition of the importance of making right decisions in the construction industry. Research and development must provide the building industry with energy efficient materials and methods of determining the most cost effective and sustainable projects. This paper presents the result from a literature review of previous research undertaken to investigate the economic feasibility of applying various types of renewable energy technologies (RETs). The literature survey shows that more than half of the economic feasibility studies undertaken used either WLC or Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This demonstrates that WLC can be used to assess the cost benefits of available RETs effectively. The survey however, has identified that, most RETs studied were of isolated systems and not directly applicable to buildings, despite the fact that buildings account for most energy consumption. Thus, detailed economic analysis should be used to investigate the long term cost benefits of RETs to promote a wider implementation in the building industry.