A growing fear among construction industry watchers was that as China’s construction boom grew, its building-related energy consumption would rise to insatiable levels.

However, Chinese authorities have stepped in to established a range of ‘green’ building plans and policies in order to reduce power and water consumption to more sustainable levels.

The Chinese Ministry of Construction is reported to have told all city administrations to cut their building energy use in half by 2010. There is also a plan to retrofit a quarter of public buildings to increase their energy efficiency in the same time frame.

In what could be seen as a radical move to achieve these targets, the Chinese Government has created a framework of minimum requirements for energy efficiency. Using the average energy efficiency of Chinese buildings in 1980, the aim is to decrease energy use on all new construction by 50% before 2010 and by 65% before 2020.

Local governments in Shanghai and Beijing have gone one step further by making the minimum requirement 65% well ahead of the 2020 deadline.

Across China, a number of LEED-certified developments have been created, including factories, shopping malls and apartments.

The LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System, developed by the United States Green Building Council, provides a suite of Standards for environmentally sustainable construction.

Since its inception in 1998, LEED has grown to encompass more than 14,000 projects in the US and 30 other countries covering more than one billion square feet (99km²) of development area (see www.usgbc.org for more details).

An ambitious project north of Dongzhimen is the Linked Hybrid building – a LEED-rated residential development that goes beyond the typical model for high-density housing.

Linked Hybrid is a self-contained complex of apartments, offices, shops and a cinema. Where the building diverges from previous constructions is in its use of sustainable features including geothermal heating, a wastewater recycling plant (to partly water the site’s immense gardens), an elaborate indoor ventilation system that pipes in clean air, and roof gardens.

The building developer has used the environmental friendliness as a selling point for the luxury apartments, which cost considerably more than comparable dwellings. And there is no shortage of buyers.

Stevel Holl Architects describes Linked Hybrid as: “Filmic urban space, around, over and through multi-faceted spatial layers, is one of the central aims of this complex with more than 700 apartments in eight towers sited adjacent to the old city wall of Beijing. The aspiration of the developer Modern Group is for an ultra-modern expression of 21st century ecological urban living, in this 220,000m2 (1.6 million square feet) project.”

Also described as a city within a city, the site features one of the world’s largest geothermal cooling and heating systems, designed to stabilize the temperature in the complex of eight buildings. The system comprises 660 wells to provide cooling and heating.

“We can extract about 5,600kW in summer and 3,700kW in winter from the geothermal system,” says Steven Holl Architects associate Hideki Hirahara.

“That equates to about 70% of the annual heating and cooling load.”

Dual pipes carry water from about 100m (330ft) below ground, circulating it between the concrete floors and using the structure’s thermal mass as a giant radiator in winter and a cooling system in summer.