Abstract
To reach the environmental goals set by EU, Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and national building regulations will demand reductions in building’s energy consumption. Energy consumption goals for buildings are pursued through high thermal performance building components (HTPBC). Paradoxically, building regulations have no requirements regarding the embodied energy of buildings and components. To meet the requirements set by governments, HTPBCs in most cases require an increasing embodied energy (from insulation), assumed to be paid back during the service-life of HTPBCs. Accounting for decarbonization of the future energy supply, the expected payback might not be feasible in terms of total environmental footprint, since the future energy supplies are expected to be greener than the building’s embodied energy. Using roof windows as a case study, we assess if strict demands for building’s energy consumption, will lead to more sustainable buildings if all temporal variations in terms of global warming impacts across the service-life are taken into account. A comparison of double and tripple glazed windows reveals that the expected net energy savings obtained during the use phase are compromised by relatively higher impacts induced in the production stage. The case study indicates requirements of building’s energy performance might compromise the overall sustainability of building component solutions, as the additional embodied energy required to produce triple glazed windows most likely will not be compensated for by saved operational energy, when taking into account the forecasted decarbonatization of the building energy future supply.
Highlights
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of building components can be used to select environmentally favourable building components
LCAs of such components are most often conducted in a formalised manner relying on standardized and traditional product system modelling principles assuming that the foreground and background systems of building components remain unaltered across the entire servicelife of the building components, even in the case when the service-lives amount to 5-6 decades
On the other hand will the environmental performance of building components serving functional purposes, needing replacement(s), needing energy supply, demanding maintenance during the service-life of the building in which they are installed, to a much larger extent be influenced by temporal changes in the foreground and background systems
Summary
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of building components can be used to select environmentally favourable building components. Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd building and not demanding any replacement nor maintenance across the service-life of the entire building, the changes in the background and foreground systems of the product system will most likely only have moderate to low influence on the overall environmental performance of the component. The limited influence of the temporally dependent system changes on the environmental performance of such building components, stems from fact that the changes in the foreground and background systems only will affect processes taking place after installation which for the such “passive” building components is limited to disposal or rather End-of-Life (EoL) processes. Purposes), needing replacement(s), needing energy supply, demanding maintenance during the service-life of the building in which they are installed, to a much larger extent be influenced by temporal changes in the foreground and background systems. The fact that the LCA framework from early on was not envisioned to account for temporal system changes, makes accounting for temporal changes (obviously) quite tricky, since the most elementary parts on an LCA i.e. inventory data and product system modelling both are designed not to be able to account for temporal changes
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