A spatio-temporal life cycle assessment framework for building renovation scenarios at the urban scale

Abstract

Reducing the energy consumption of buildings is a priority for carbon emissions mitigation in urban areas. Building stock energy models have been developed to support decisions of public authorities in renovation strategies. However, the burdens of renovation interventions and their temporal distribution are mostly overlooked, leading to potential overestimation of environmental benefits. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) provides a holistic estimation of environmental impacts, but further developments are needed to correctly consider spatio-temporal aspects.We propose a spatio-temporal LCA framework to assess renovation scenarios of urban housing stocks, integrating: 1) a geospatial building-by-building stock model, 2) energy demand modelling, 3) product-based LCA, and 4) a scenario generator.Temporal aspects are considered both in the lifecycle inventory and the lifecycle impact assessment phases, by accounting for the evolution of the existing housing stock and applying time-adjusted carbon footprint calculation.We apply the framework for the carbon footprint assessment of housing renovation in Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg). Results show that the renovation stage represents 4% to 16% of the carbon footprint in the residual service life of existing buildings, respectively after conventional or advanced renovations. Under current renovation rates, the carbon footprint reduction would be limited to 3-4% by 2030. Pushing renovation rates to 3%, enables carbon reductions up to 28% by 2030 when combined with advanced renovations. Carbon reductions in the operational stage of buildings are offset by 8-9% due to the impacts of renovation. Using time-adjusted emissions, results in higher weight for the renovation stage and slightly lower benefits for renovation.

Renewable Energy Deployment and COVID-19 Measures for Sustainable Development

“…It is unknown to what extent the observed slowdown in the spread from March 2020 to September 2020 due to the policy's impact and not the interaction between the virus and the external environment. All renewable energy producers decreased the volume of renewable energy supply in 2020 (except China) [59][60][61][62][63][64][65]. The results expand the literature and show that various COVID-19 restrictive strategies led to a reduction in sustainable demand for renewable energy [66][67][68].…”

Environmental modelling of building stocks – An integrated review of life cycle-based assessment models to support EU policy making

“…Some static models, however, include scenarios or variations to improve the model accuracy by considering, e.g., different renovation scenarios or varying energy mixes [17,20,32]. In their scenario analyses, some studies focus on different renovation scenarios [19,21,29,34,38], while others vary energy mixes to study their in uence on the environmental impacts during operation [16,18,31]. Five studies include dynamic climate or weather data [24,29,35,38,39].…”

“…It should be noted that the four studies of Krarti et al [28,29,34,40] are, for the most part, based on a common methodology. In terms of temporal dynamics, two studies explicitly present the change in environmental impacts over time [19,22], and four studies present the change in material ows [18,22,26,31]. Finally, individual studies focus on other dynamic aspects, e.g., the in uence of changing recycling rates…”

“…Ten out of the 22 studies use statistical data on demographics and building information. These statistical data include national open source datasets [24,26,37] and generalized datasets regarding building parameters such as type of use or geometry [19][20][21][22]. Five papers ll gaps using data from other studies on building stock levels to estimate the climate impact [16], determine quantities of building materials [31,36] or apply the methodology developed in a previous paper [23] (by the same author).…”

Heating Energy Consumption and Environmental Implications Due to the Change in Daily Habits in Residential Buildings Derived from COVID-19 Crisis: The Case of Barcelona, Spain

“…However, this paper does not show energy consumption savings nor economic costs. Mastrucci et al [31] propose a method to determine the energy demand and carbon footprint reduction potential for renovating the existing housing stock of Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg). To calculate the energy demand, this paper uses a simplified equation.…”