Abstract
The COVID-19 crisis has changed daily habits and the time that people spend at home. It is expected that this change may have environmental implications because of buildings’ heating energy demand. This paper studies the energy and environmental implications, from a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, due to these new daily habits in residential buildings at their current level of thermal insulation, and in different scenarios of thermal retrofit of their envelope. This study has a building-to-building approach by using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for the residential housing stock in the case of Barcelona, Spain. The results show that a change in daily habits derived from the pandemic can increase the heating energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission in residential buildings by 182%. Retrofitting all buildings of Barcelona, according to conventional energy renovation instead of nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEB), will produce between 2.25 × 107 and 2.57 × 107 tons of carbon dioxide. Retrofitting the building stock using energy recovery is the option with better energy and emission savings, but also is the option with higher payback time for buildings built until 2007. The methodology presented can be applied in any city with sufficient cadastral data, and is considered optimal in the European context, as it goes for calculating the heating energy consumption.
Highlights
Buildings are responsible for the 40% of energy consumption in Europe [1].Almost 50% of the European Union’s (EU) final energy consumption is used for heating and cooling in which 80% is used in buildings [2]
This paper presents a methodology, which analyses at urban scale the influence of heating energy consumption due to changes in daily life habits in residential buildings through different energy retrofit scenarios
Considering the post-COVID-19 results confirm the recommendation found on the recent literature to include heat recovsituation, conventional renovation achieves between 42% and 81% energy and emissions ery in ventilation systems to minimize the demand for heating in homes even in mild saving, nZEB1 achieve between 75% and 91% of savings and nZEB2 between 92% and climates to achieve minimum levels of energy consumption [37]
Summary
Almost 50% of the European Union’s (EU) final energy consumption is used for heating and cooling in which 80% is used in buildings [2]. The European Union has established the requirement that all Member States (MS) should reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG). Emissions from the building stock by at least 55% by 2030 and by at least 90% in 2050. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to reduce energy consumption in new buildings, but to retrofit the building stock. In Spain, 66% of building stock are residential buildings [5] and 56.3% of residential buildings are erected before 1980, i.e., before the first energy saving regulations for buildings were approved [6]
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