Fundamentals of Scotland Section 6 (2022)
New Scotland Section 6 (2022) came into force in Scotland on December 1st 2022 and applies to non-domestic buildings beginning construction after this date. The regulations require designers to demonstrate further reductions in carbon emissions from building energy use relative to the standards set by the previous editions of the regulations. This is achieved by performing a detailed analysis of the energy and carbon emissions of two buildings:
- The actual building – the building as designed, but subject to standard patterns of occupancy and plant operation, and
- The notional building – a version of the building that conforms to the standards defined in the National Calculation Methodology (NCM) Modelling Guide (for buildings other than dwellings). The notional building is subject to the same occupancy and plant operation patterns as the actual building.
The analysis of carbon emissions must be performed with accredited software applying the National Calculation Methodology (NCM), implemented in a Dynamic Simulation Method (DSM) such as ApacheSim or BRE’s SBEM program (driven by either the native iSBEM interface or a proprietary interface such as VE-SBEM).
The actual building’s performance must improve on that of the notional building.
Assessments must be performed under standard occupancy and plant operating conditions. This means that under the new regulations, some of the data entered by the user to model the building for design work has to be replaced by different data for the purpose of compliance analysis.
It should be remembered that Scotland Section 6 (2022) places the requirement for standard occupancy and plant operating conditions on a model. The consequence of this is that, in addition to the actual and notional buildings, the designer will usually need to model and analyse (for design and other non-regulations purposes) a third building:
- The real building – this is the building as designed, and with the occupancy and plant operation conditions expected to apply in reality, rather than the standard conditions stipulated for Scotland Section 6 (2022) compliance.
The real building is the building presented in the Apache View, where the special conditions required for NCM analyses are not applied.