Abstract
The cost-effectiveness of energy efficiency measures meant to achieve a zero-emission office building is investigated and compared to business as usual energy efficiency measures. The laboratory for zero emission buildings, the ZEB Lab, located in Trondheim, Norway, is an office building designed and built to compensate its lifecycle emissions with the use of a large array of building-integrated photovoltaic panels, pursuing a zero-emissions ambition level. Three design alternatives are investigated by downgrading the building insulation level to the values recommended by the currently enforced Norwegian building code, the byggteknisk forskrift TEK17. A sensitivity analysis of the variation of the installed area of the photovoltaic panels is performed to evaluate if smaller areas give better cost performances. Net present values are calculated by using three scenarios of future increase of electricity price for a time horizon of 20 years. Results show that business as usual solutions give higher net present values. Optimized areas of the photovoltaic panels further increase the net present values of the business as usual solutions in the highest electricity price scenario. The zero-emission ambition level shows a higher net present value than that of the business as usual solutions for a time horizon of at least 36 years.
Highlights
Both the building industry and the building stock are energy-intensive sectors and cause significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
The European Commission highlighted that the national definitions of the nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEBs) are to implement levels of energy efficiency which should not be below the cost-optimal level of minimum requirements [4]
A zero-emission office building, the Zero Emission Building (ZEB) LAB, is used as a test case to evaluate whether a high energy ambition level gives higher Net Present Values than that of BAU solutions
Summary
Both the building industry and the building stock are energy-intensive sectors and cause significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To pursue the planned reduction of GHG emissions in the EU industrial sectors [2], the European Commission set an ambitious energy performance for new buildings in the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive [3]. The quantification of the buildings’ energy demand is left to each Member State (MS) to decide according to climatic conditions and national methods for the energy calculations. This led to a variety of nZEB definitions across the MSs in terms of building categories, boundaries for calculating the energy inflows/outflows, and national input data used in the energy calculation [5]. The cost–optimal level is defined as “the energy performance level which leads to the lowest cost during the estimated economic lifecycle” [3] from a financial perspective (lowest cost by considering the operational energy cost, the energy-related investment cost, and maintenance costs) and a macro-economic perspective
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