ASHRAE Journal - December 2019 - 66

COLUMN IEQ APPLICATIONS

ALDREN-TAIL Index
For Rating IEQ
BY PAWEL WARGOCKI, PH.D., ASSOCIATE MEMBER ASHRAE; CORINNE MANDIN, PH.D.; WENJUAN WEI, PH.D.

Energy renovation of the building stock is crucial for
reducing CO2 emissions. The "Alliance for Deep Energy
Renovation" -ALDREN project (www.aldren.eu) is one of
the projects launched in Europe to address this matter. Its
main objective is to accelerate the process of deep energy
renovation (DER) of buildings, with a focus on ofﬁces and
hotels. It is providing incentives and presenting tools that
ensure and promote successful retroﬁts.
Among the tools developed by ALDREN is an index and
a protocol for rating the quality of the indoor environment (IEQ) in buildings that have undergone DER. They
are described in this column.
The need for such tools is twofold:
1) They are intended to verify that IEQ is not
degraded during renovation, thus satisfying the Energy
Performance of Building Directive (EPBD) issued in the
amended form in 2010 by the European Commission
mandating that "Member States should support energy performance upgrades of existing buildings that contribute to achieving
a healthy indoor environment" and that each long-term
renovation strategy shall encompass "an evidence-based
estimate of expected energy savings and wider beneﬁts such as
those related to health, safety and air quality".
2) They enable documentation of IEQ improvements
after renovation and, consequently, potential beneﬁts
from renovation for the health and well-being of building occupants. These improvements will additionally
enable estimation of ﬁnancial beneﬁts from improved
occupant productivity (Wargocki and Seppanen, 2006)
and increased building value, including the aspects
such as lease renewal or time needed to lease the space
66

ASHRAE JOURNAL

ashrae.org

D E C E M B E R 2 0 19

on the market. These ﬁnancial beneﬁts create consequently a persuasive argument and incentive for building owners to perform energy renovations.
The index proposed by ALDREN is called TAIL
(Figure 1). This new index enables rating IEQ in ofﬁces
and hotels that undergo DER before and after renovation. The index was developed because there is no standard method used to quantify IEQ in buildings undergoing energy retroﬁt, and generally no agreed method
and index for rating IEQ in buildings exists at present.
TAIL is an attempt to ﬁll this gap. As illustrated in Table 1,
many different parameters have been used to characterize IEQ (Table 1 lists parameters proposed by green building and sustainability certiﬁcation schemes), but no
single metric or common framework has been deﬁned
that could be adopted by the ALDREN project.
TAIL index embraces four major components of IEQ and
provides information on the quality of each of these four
components in a built environment including as follows:
* Thermal environment (T);
* Acoustic environment (A);
* Indoor Air Quality (I); and
* Luminous (visual) environment (L).
The quality level for each component is described by
four colors:
* Green stands for high quality;
* Yellow for medium quality;
* Orange for moderate quality; and
Pawel Wargocki, Ph.D., is associate professor at the International Centre for Indoor Environment
and Energy, Department of Civil Engineering, Corinne Mandin, Ph.D., is head of the IAQ Department,
and Wenjuan Wei, Ph.D., is a research engineer at the Technical University of Denmark.

http://www.aldren.eu https://www.ashrae.org/

ASHRAE Journal - December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASHRAE Journal - December 2019