Abstract
In this study, the Swiss residential building stock model (SwissRes model) is used to conduct a geospatial analysis of the techno-economic potential of deep building envelope retrofit packages in Switzerland. Element and building characteristics of 8242 archetype buildings are combined with high-resolution spatio-temporal weather data. We estimate final energy demand before and after retrofit, while correcting for the energy performance gap. Levelized costs of energy savings are calculated in two ways, i.e. based on full costs and investment cost related only to thermal improvement of the envelope. Results show that, technically, a 57% reduction of the final energy demand for space heating could be achieved with the deep envelope retrofit. For full costs, less than 1% of these measures would be cost-effective, whereas for improvement costs nearly the full retrofit potential is cost-effective. We identified primarily rural and mountainous regions as well as historic city centres to show highest cost-effectiveness.
Highlights
It is a key objective of the Swiss Energy Strategy 2050 to substantially increase the energy efficiency of buildings
Energy savings In total, the simulation with SwissRes reveals that 25.8 TWh/a of final energy (57%) could be saved by applying the full envelope retrofit to the residential building stock
Cost effectiveness analysis According to our cost-effectiveness analysis the total investment cost for retrofitting the entire Swiss residential building stock would amount to roughly 247 billion CHF, which equals to approximately 590 CHF per m2 of energy reference area (ERA)
Summary
It is a key objective of the Swiss Energy Strategy 2050 to substantially increase the energy efficiency of buildings. It is crucial to foster energy efficiency improvement of the building stock by identifying buildings that show a high energy saving potential at relatively low cost. Results from our bottom-up Swiss residential energy model (SwissRes) showed that the thermal performance can be substantially improved for certain building archetypes [2,3]. Significant variation in savings and economic potential across the building archetypes were found. As it is known that the distribution of archetypes across the country is not uniform, and that climate conditions vary across the Swiss regions, it would be very beneficial for policy makers, and owners to have information on individual building archetypes and their spatial distribution in a given region or city
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