Benefits of energy related building renovation in residents comfort and well-being – Vila d’Este case study (original) (raw)
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Energy savings and carbon reduction due to renovated buildings
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The paper deals with an energy saving case study of a renovated building in comparison with the building energy balance before renovation. The renovation was carried out in the building envelopes such as external walls, floor on ground and the flat roof for the improvement of thermal insulation properties of the investigated building. The renovation has brought forward energy saving effects, which are important for both reducing energy consumption for heating during winter seasons and the associated heating costs. In addition, the renovation represents a positive environmental impact due to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions from such dwellings. The energy renovation of the case study building evaluated was used as a base for an estimation of energy savings and reductions of carbon emissions within a housing estate residential complex with twenty similar buildings. The study presents the importance of having such thermally insulated building envelopes in building together with windows that also have good thermal property and insulation quality for the reduction of overall energy consumption.
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It is increasingly recognised that the energy renovation of the existing building stock will be determinant for achieving 2030 and 2050 decarbonisation targets in Europe. As operational energy is being dramatically reduced through regulatory efforts and funding from the European Union, the relevance of the environmental performance of these interventions becomes higher, namely regarding embodied energy and carbon emissions associated with the materials that compose the renovation solutions. Although some studies address these impacts in buildings, the range of studies focusing on the neighbourhood scale is limited. This article presents a methodological framework combining a life cycle cost assessment (LCC) and a life cycle assessment (LCA). The purpose is to assess the relevance of embodied energy and carbon emissions on the cost-effectiveness of building renovation solutions towards nZEB at the neighbourhood scale by comparing an operational energy approach and a whole life cycle ...
Engineering for Rural Development, 2024
The article analyses the results of the 2016-2023 national programme of multi-apartment building renovation in Latvia, being importantly co-financed by ERDF, and there was used the publicly available database of this programme implementation, as of 31st December 2023. This was complementary analysed during the six deep semi-structured interviews with main stakeholders and experts at the municipal level particularly. Valmiera city and county municipality was chosen for a case study as one of the most pro-energy active municipalities in the country, having developed and introduced a complementary set of energy governance instruments. The challenges are particularly related to the management and economic aspects and their interconnection with engineering ones as being identified. Within 2016-2023 in total around 22.8 thousand apartments (over 620 buildings) are renovated at national scale, however that is only around 4% of the total number of apartments. The planned thermal energy savings constitute around 0.9% of the total final energy consumption of the household sector in Latvia as being the high impact. High energy efficiency for heating is achieved in the renovated buildings (after renovation, the "B" energy efficiency class is achieved on average), however, the low number of renovated buildings still limits the impact of the programme. The renovation projects have a long (around 30 years in average) payback period, if compared with the actual district heating tariffs, thus, such renovation is hardly possible without the public grant part. Particularly, for completed projects in 2023 the specific costs significantly increase. The renovation of apartment buildings is analysed in the context of the energy citizenship (ENCI) concept. About 60% of building renovation are carried out by the legal institutional forms established by apartment owners, particularly, housing associations registered as NGOs. During the renovation of buildings, zero-emission decentralized energy production technologies are not installed until now, only few examples can be noted. Although the requirements of this renovation programme allowed, it could be assumed that the overall management and economic conditions were not enough attractive for the promotion of pro-sumerism for households or organizations to practice bothproduce and consume energy.
Strategy for the energy renovation of the housing stock in Comunitat Valenciana (Spain)
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The Spanish residential building stock built between 1940-1980 period presents a high energy saving potential as it represents a significant percentage of the total housing stock and it was built without any regulation regarding energy efficiency. Accordingly, the first aim of this paper was to quantify the energy saving potential and the related reduction in CO 2 emissions of the housing stock in those years. The work focuses on the Mediterranean climate of the Comunitat Valenciana Region, therefore the energy efficiency strategies proposed are passive and deal with the envelope of buildings. On the basis of the results obtained, several scenarios with intervention periods of 10, 20 and 30 years were calculated. The conclusion was that with the current rate of annual building renovation, it will be nearly impossible to reach the goals established by the EPBD. Only a deep transformation of the building fabric within this sector could help in achieving them. Finally, it should be noted that the proposed methodology can be applied to other areas with different climates, particularly in Spain.
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The application of the European directives related to the energy consumption of existing buildings leads to the integration of efficient techniques into the refurbishment actions. This procedure allows reaching high energy savings and reducing pollutant emissions. The identification of the energy consumption profile of the building stocks is a necessary step to evaluate the impact of retrofit measures. With this aim, the energy performance of representative dwellings has been analyzed to develop a citizen-oriented platform. This representativeness has been chosen through one parametric matrix that characterizes the residential building stock of Madrid. Different refurbishment strategies have been highlighted to assess the energy savings in comparison with the initial situation. Two building cases and three boundary conditions have been selected to develop six TRNSYS models. The energy impact produced by the implementation of selected refurbishment strategies has been evaluated through a sensitivity analysis. Batteries of simulations have been executed coupling the TRNSYS models with GenOpt. The most influential strategies are the typology of façades, insulation at the roof, variable set point temperatures, better glazing and exterior summer shading over the windows. Building performances to minimize the annual thermal needs and one economic study have been developed.
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ABSTRACT: The Portuguese housing sector experienced a significant growth throughout the 20 century, particularly in the last quarter, after the democratic revolution in 1974. In fact, the number of buildings built between 1970 and 1990 ismore than one third of the buildings actually existing in Portugal. Therefore most of them were built before the publication of the first regulation concerning the energy efficiency in buildings. Regarding this scenario, it would be expected that rehabilitation activities would represent most of the current construction activities. However, given some remaining barriers from old social policies, this situation is not observed; actually building retrofitting is the least significant sector, accentuating the degradation level of major part of the Portuguese housing stock. Several studies show that the main problems are found in the building’s envelope elements, such as roofs and facades. Based on this context, the aim of this paper is to introduce som...
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To accelerate energy saving in the built environment, housing associations should apply low-energy techniques in existing houses which are in need of renovation. Because of a lack of knowledge it is difficult for housing associations to determine which low-energy technique has the best results for energy consumption and CO 2 -emissions. In this research a decision support tool will be developed with a new energy performance calculation method at district level including aspects like houses, transport and households. In this paper we focus on the critical factors at the building level that should be included in a district data model. Therefore we have executed a screening analysis to indicate what these critical factors are.