Influence of building characteristics and renovation techniques on the energy-saving performances of EU smart city projects

Abstract

Because several buildings constructed in the process of urbanization are aged, several countries in the EU have been aware of the problems in terms of the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of these existing buildings. To address these problems, various studies have been conducted to determine an improvement method for the energy performance of aged buildings by adopting the smart city concept. However, because they have primarily focused on the software aspects of monitoring and control using IT technologies, studies on the hardware aspects (that is, the characteristics of buildings and renovation techniques for energy saving) that affect energy performance have been underrepresented in the context of smart cities. Therefore, by using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique, this study aims to analyze the causal relationship by examining how the characteristics of buildings and energy-saving techniques affect the energy performance of EU smart city projects. To implement SEM for depicting causal relationships, a case study based on 55 building cases on 11 EU smart city projects was conducted, and the significant direct/indirect effects of hardware aspects on energy-saving performance were successfully suggested.