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Abstract
Passivhaus EnerPHit is a rigorous retrofit energy standard for buildings, based on high thermal insulation and airtightness levels, which aims to significantly reduce building energy consumption during operation. However, extra retrofit materials are required to achieve this standard, which raises a contradiction between how to balance the environmental impacts of the retrofitting material inputs and extremely low energy consumption after retrofit. This motivated the analysis in this paper, which aimed to evaluate the possibilities of reducing the required retrofitting material inputs when trying to achieve the EnerPHit energy standard using a typical suburban dwelling in China’s hot summer–cold winter climate region as a case study. Firstly, how the insulation performance of each envelope component affected the building’s energy consumption was analysed. Based on this, sensitivity simulations of combinations of different insulation levels with different fabric components were investigated under four scenarios of insulation levels, airtightness and glazing choice. The final proposed retrofitting plans achieved the EnerPHit standard with insulation materials’ savings between 18% to 58% compared to a baseline retrofit plan, and this led, in turn, to 3.9 to 12.6 tonnes of carbon reductions. Moreover, an energy-saving of 87% in heating and 70% in cooling was achieved compared with the pre-retrofit dwelling.
Highlights
Against the background of climate change and resource exhaustion, improving the energy efficiency of buildings has been recognised as a method that has great potential for intervention
This paper considered the possibility of retrofitting plans which enable a case building to achieve the Passivhaus EnerPHit standard energy efficiency while the material inputs could be decreased against a baseline retrofit plan
The first finding from this research was that the heating demand should be the dominant factor to be considered in retrofitting under the hot summer–cold winter climate, because it was found to be much more sensitive to the envelope thermal performance changes than the cooling energy demand, and higher thermal performances from all the tested parameters were needed to achieve the EnerPHit heating criteria than the cooling criteria
Summary
Against the background of climate change and resource exhaustion, improving the energy efficiency of buildings has been recognised as a method that has great potential for intervention. Research relating to building energy efficiency has been receiving increased attention in China in recent years, especially regarding the energy retrofitting of existing buildings. The reason for this is that older buildings account for a large proportion of the building stock, and they were built with poor standards of energy-efficient design and technology in most cases [2]. Retrofitting of the non-urban dwellings is crucial for the energy efficient transformation of the building sector
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