Environmental and economic life cycle evaluation of residential buildings refurbishments by the calibration with monitored data

Abstract

Buildings are responsible of about the 40% of the energy consumption and the 36% of the greenhouse gas emissions of the European Union (EU), taking into account all the stages of the buildings’ life; in response, the energetic refurbishment of buildings is one of the main keys to pursue the decarbonisation targets of the EU. Following this, numerous scientific studies, recommendations of the EU and recent publications such as the “Roadmap for the decarbonisation of buildings throughout their life cycle” published by GBC in 2022; where the integration of the life cycle assessment (LCA) is defined as one of the pillars to be able to assess and quantify the decarbonisation of the building stock. Moreover, studies found the high influence of non-operational stages of the buildings’ life on the environmental and economic sustainability of building refurbishment, and according to the literature, the LCA is the prioritizing analysis on building refurbishment studies. Besides, regular energetic assessments, like energy performance certificates (EPC), are not considered reliable due to the standard input, presenting the need of calibration of inputs by real data calibration. Furthermore, other studies also showed the importance of the occupant behaviour for the energetic calculations, and the high influence of base temperature input for heating and cooling energy demand simulations.