Abstract
In Europe, the second recast of EPBD promotes long-term strategies to accelerate the path to nZEBs, fostering the cost-optimized building design already suggested in the EPBD first recast. Since the nZEB design is a complex optimization problem that is subjected to uncertainty in its boundary conditions (climate, technologies, market, ...), it is necessary to guarantee the resilience of the NZEB optimal design to possible variations of future scenarios, especially as regards the climate change. This work applies the new EdeSSOpt methodology (Energy Demand and Supply Simultaneous Optimization) developed by the Authors aiming at investigating the variation of the cost-optimized multi-family building design in different Italian future climate scenarios, therefore considering parameters related to the building envelope, energy systems and renewable energy sources. The method is implemented into the TRNSYS® (energy model), GenOpt (optimizer) and WeatherShift® (future climate scenario generator) tools. The resulting cost-optimal solutions in future scenarios are related to a lower global cost and a decreased total primary energy consumption. Beyond the future trends of such performance indexes, the fact that most of technical solutions associated with the optimal solutions have not changed with the studied climate scenarios, indicates a certain resilience of the optimal design variables facing climate change.
Highlights
Being the main responsible for energy consumption in Europe, the building sector has great potential for optimization and improvement in energy and cost-related terms [1]. 40% of European primary energy consumption involves residential and non-residential buildings [2]
This study aims to investigate the effects of global cost optimization performed on a real case study subjected to different future climate scenarios, for the period 20262045
The two future scenarios for the period 2026-2045 results led to similar results, which are quite different from the actual reference climate
Summary
Being the main responsible for energy consumption in Europe, the building sector has great potential for optimization and improvement in energy and cost-related terms [1]. 40% of European primary energy consumption involves residential and non-residential buildings [2]. 40% of European primary energy consumption involves residential and non-residential buildings [2] This fact led the European Commission to take action on the matter with the Energy Performance of Building Directive (EPDB) and its recasts, promoting some guidelines on the energy efficient design and innovation of buildings with the aim of defining a roadmap towards the decarbonization of the European building stock, achieving the nZEB (nearly Zero Energy Building) objective [3]. In this context, the first EPBD recast foresees the implementation of innovative energy efficiency measures in order to reduce the energy needs of buildings as well as their maintenance costs over the short, medium and long term [3]. To promote the development of economically feasible solutions, the EPDB has introduced the costoptimal methodology, a framework adopted by both the Member States and the scientific community that aims to find cost-effective design solutions for energy saving [5, 6]
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