The applicability of different energy performance calculation methods for building life cycle environmental optimization

Abstract

Building life cycle assessment is getting more and more attention within the topic of environmental impact caused by the built environment. Although more and more research focus on the embodied impact of buildings, the investigation of the operational energy use still needs attention. The majority of the building stock still does not comply with the nearly zero energy requirements. Also, in case of retrofitting, when most of the embodied impact is already spent on the existing structures (and so immutable), the importance of the operational energy rises. There are several methods to calculate the energy performance of buildings covering the range from simplified seasonal methods to detailed hourly energy simulations. Not only the accuracy of the calculations, but the computational time can be significantly different within the methods. The latter is especially important in case of optimization, when there is limited time to perform one calculation. Our research shows that the use of different calculation techniques can lead to different optima for environmental impacts in case of retrofitting. In this paper we compare these calculation methods with focus on computational time, accuracy and applicability to environmental optimization of buildings. We present the results in a case study of the retrofitting of a middle-sized apartment house in Hungary.