Optimal design of building envelope towards life cycle performance: Impact of considering dynamic grid emission factors

Abstract

Building-related carbon emissions in the construction and operation stages account for more than one-third of global energy-related emissions. Optimizing during the early design stage is an effective way to reduce building carbon emissions. However, current studies adopt a constant grid emission factor (GEF) to assess the environmental impacts of buildings while ignoring the dynamic changes of the future electricity mix. This will overestimate the operational carbon emissions of the building in the context of the increasing share of renewable energy in power generation. In this study, a dynamic life cycle assessment model based on dynamic GEF is constructed to evaluate the life cycle environmental impacts of buildings. On this basis, a building optimization design framework considering dynamic GEF is proposed, and the impact of considering future variations of GEF on the optimal design of the building envelope is explored. The study is conducted in three steps. First, dynamically changing GEFs are predicted under the future electricity mix based on scenario analysis. Second, a multi-objective optimization framework is established to minimize the life cycle carbon emissions (LCCE) of the building while optimizing its life cycle costs (LCC) and indoor discomfort hours (IDH). Finally, the proposed optimization framework is applied to a prototype office building in Shanghai, and a comparative analysis is conducted for the optimal schemes between a static and two dynamic scenarios. The result reveals that ignoring future variations will lead to overestimating the operational carbon emissions by 49.0%-64.8%, which in turn will result in an over-insulated design of the envelope (i.e., additional material consumption). In addition, compared to the static scenario, consideration of dynamic GEF results in a 38.7%-51.6% reduction in LCCE, a 5.2%-6.1% reduction in LCC, and a 5.3%-9.5% increase in IDH for the optimal solutions. This research illustrates the importance of considering dynamic GEF in identifying the optimal design parameters and can help decision-makers reasonably choose the optimal schemes during early-stage design.