Abstract
The substantial contribution of buildings in the energy consumption and emissions renders the existing building stock a key element to tackle the climate crisis. Consequently, defining a deliberate decision-making process gains importance. Decisions are currently often based on building codes, budget, and in the best case Pareto optimality of the energy performance and the net present value of the life-cycle cost. The growing attention to sustainability, however, raises questions about the effect of environmental considerations on the outcome of the Pareto optimal solutions. This study quantifies the effect of including the environmental aspect as a third dimension to the current evaluation approach. Therefore, the most appropriate renovation measures are selected using a multidimensional Pareto optimization. The method is applied to a residential high-rise building in Belgium. Firstly, the Pareto front is constituted based on life-cycle costing and life-cycle assessment separately. Subsequently, the respective results are combined into an integrated life cycle approach by enumerating the LCA results as an external cost to the LCC results. The results show that the Pareto optimal solutions from a financial and environmental perspective do not coincide. Although the financial aspect dominates, adding the environmental cost eliminates low-performant financial optima, leading to optimal solutions with a larger insulation thickness.
Highlights
Over 90% of the European existing building stock was built before 1990 [1]
The aim of this paper was to quantify the effect of integrating life-cycle and multidimensional thinking in the decision-making process considering different renovation strategies, in contrast to the standard approach which is only based on the financial construction costs and the operational energy use for space heating
Whereas the conventional mind-set is to keep the construction costs to a minimum, annual operational energy savings could potentially compensate the initial costs. This statement is verified from an environmental perspective as the extra initial cost to increase the insulation level is most often compensated by the associated energy savings
Summary
Over 90% of the European existing building stock was built before 1990 [1]. The substantial contribution of these buildings in the global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions renders the existing building stock a key element to tackle the climate crisis and to improve its energy performance.By 2050, the European greenhouse gas emissions need to be cut by 80-95% [2]. Over 90% of the European existing building stock was built before 1990 [1]. The substantial contribution of these buildings in the global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions renders the existing building stock a key element to tackle the climate crisis and to improve its energy performance. A vast 97% of the buildings need to be renovated to meet these 2050 climate targets, whereas the current European renovation rate is only 1%, which is clearly insufficient to reach those goals [3]. Increasing the renovation rate could significantly reduce both the global energy consumption and the environmental impact of the existing building stock [4]. To tackle the urgent need of increased renovation rates, a wide range of renovation strategies is available. Establishing a deliberate decision-making method considering different renovation measures gains prominence [5,6]
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