Abstract
The environmental impacts of buildings can significantly vary with the dynamics of their energy demand and production. Significant variations have been modelled for buildings in the U.S., France, Denmark and Switzerland but the levels of variation are different between these countries. This difference can be explained by factors like the existing energy sources, the availability of renewable energy and the importation of electricity from nearby countries. With its high share of renewable energy and significant electricity exchanges with neighbouring countries, Switzerland presents a specific case where benchmark values from dynamic life cycle assessment should be well understood. The project’s goal is to provide results from a dynamic life cycle assessment with a detailed study of the influence from temporal fluctuations in the national electricity production, electricity imports, decentralised generation and electricity demand from buildings. Additionally, consequences of changing the temporal precision (i.e. hourly, daily, monthly and annual) of energy dynamics are analysed. This assessment is conducted with demand and production estimations for the design of a residential building in Switzerland. Disparities of results are assessed for all temporal precision levels with a comparison to the values that are obtained with the current national methodology which operates with values based on average annual electricity production. Results thus suggest some methodological recommendations to develop the temporal aspects of the environmental impact assessment methodology for the Swiss building sector.
Highlights
Numerous life cycle assessment (LCA) studies of buildings have shown that energy demand, during their use phase, is often a key source of environmental impacts over their full life cycles
Disparities of results are assessed for all temporal precision levels with a comparison to the values that are obtained with the current national methodology which operates with values based on average annual electricity production
A LCA study of a Swiss residential building has been conducted with different levels of temporal precision to model the potential environmental impacts of the dynamics of its energy demand and production during its use stage
Summary
Numerous life cycle assessment (LCA) studies of buildings have shown that energy demand, during their use phase, is often a key source of environmental impacts over their full life cycles. When looking at the question of intra-annual variations of energy demand and production, the importance of such dynamics on LCA results have been investigated since 2013 mainly in the US [3,4,5], France [6,7,8], Denmark [9] and Switzerland [10, 11] These studies have evaluated the impacts of rather recent residential [6,7,8, 10, 11], commercial [9] and institutional [3,4,5] buildings.
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