THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND BUILDING RENOVATION ON HEATING RELATED CO2 EMISSIONS ON A NEIGHBOURHOOD LEVEL

Abstract

Building sector is currently one of the major sources of CO2 emissions. Considering that the largest proportion of energy in buildings in Europe is used for heating services, significant potential for emissions decrease could be exploited through heat demand reductions. The scope of this paper is to evaluate the impacts of changed climate and building renovation on heating related CO2 emissions on a neighborhood level. A combination of existing tools (EnergyPLAN, ArcGIS, CCWorldWeatherGen) and a tool previously developed by the authors (resistance-capacitance analogy based heat demand model [1]) were used. Three weather scenarios for the future were considered (low, medium, high temperature increase), as well as four renovation paths (no renovation, shallow, intermediate, deep renovation path). Three heating system options were taken into the account: individual electric heaters in each dwelling, natural gas distribution network with individual boilers in each dwelling and district heating network with centralized heat production in natural gas fueled boiler. Generic neighborhood configuration for Portugal was created based on the district of Alvalade that is located in Lisbon. This particular district was chosen due to the fact that it possesses desirable urban morphology and it was built during several construction periods over the last century. The results showed that the changed climate, by itself, could decrease annual CO2 emissions from 8% up to 34% in 2050 compared to 2010 (depending on the weather scenario and heating system considered) due to the changed weather parameters. Furthermore, building envelope renovation could enable additional 80-260ktCO2 savings in cumulative emissions for the regarded period (2010-2050).