Abstract
The cooperative housing sector is directed at low and medium income residents who cannot afford to buy their homes in the regular private market. Due to social housing legislation, it is possible to build cooperative housing below regular market costs and use tax benefits, therefore providing affordable dwellings to their owners. Traditional cooperative housing used to provide less comfort and higher running costs in indoor and domestic hot water heating than in standard construction. However, cooperative housing has started to change its method of traditional construction towards sustainable construction, in order to benefit from the savings on energy consumption and domestic water as well as to provide an improvement as far as the comfort of its residents is concerned. Therefore, in this article, the savings in electricity and natural gas in different building settlements, calculated for Madalena building—sustainable construction—and for Azenha de Cima building—traditional construction—will be presented, according to two different criteria of calculation: efficiency of dwellings at a pre-determined standard level of indoor comfort opposed to real consumptions made by residents. For each building under analysis, an energy audit and further monitoring were brought in, in order to issue an energy evaluation according to the Portuguese energy agency rules. Results showed an expected decrease of the operational costs of natural gas and electricity, obtained by the use of efficient building systems and equipment, as well as a decrease of the payback period for each situation.
Highlights
The construction sector uses a large part of the planet’s natural resources and it is becoming essential to achieve a global agreement to replace the non-renewable and non-self-sufficient resources and materials with other more sustainable ones
To analyze the differences in energy demands between a building with sustainable construction characteristics (Madalena) and a building with traditional construction features (Azenha de Cima), it is important to examine the main data of these buildings and to decide to what extent the data is important to the comparative analysis
Provides Madalena building 46% more solar gains in winter; efficient thermal insulation is responsible for 44% less energy in heating and cooling; efficient gas heaters and solar collectors are the cause of Madalena building spending 83% less energy in DHW
Summary
The construction sector uses a large part of the planet’s natural resources and it is becoming essential to achieve a global agreement to replace the non-renewable and non-self-sufficient resources and materials with other more sustainable ones. It is expected that energy costs will tend to rise in the forthcoming decades, which will increase costs even more, due to the predictable shortage of fuel [2]. These phenomena have a very particular effect in Portugal, which relies heavily on imported energy and raw materials for construction. It is mandatory to calculate which gaining costs can be obtained by using standard comfort indoor conditions and which gaining costs are obtained with real occupation of dwellings, in traditional and sustainable housing This comparison of both standard comfort gains and real gains in energy in sustainable dwellings with construction cost will define a pay-back period interval
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