Does context matter? Robust building retrofit decision-making for decarbonization across Europe

Walker, Linus; Hischier, Illias; Schlueter, Arno

doi:10.1016/j.buildenv.2022.109666

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…These approaches enlightened policy makers on how to: target homeowners' groups, expand the scope of energy renovation, consider existing energy socio-cultural elements on their agendas, or convince homeowners to shift unsustainable energy practices to match policy goals [42]. Further cross-disciplinary studies are needed where qualitative methods and citations to social science and humanities studies need to be enlarged [14] as well as discrete models, based on context-sensitive empirical data, should also be implemented [171].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From a Techno-Economic towards a Socio-Technical Approach—A Review of the Influences and Policies on Home Energy Renovations’ Decisions

2023

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Over the past decades, the debate on how to encourage energy efficiency in existing homes has been guided by a technic-economic model that has a strong focus on technologies and cost savings, in which human behavior has been devalued to a narrow behavioral economics overview. While this specific area of behavioral science enabled to capture of the dimension of energy renovations as a problem of homeowners’ individual choice, the collective and social aspects of energy efficiency are still largely overlooked on the energy policy agenda. With its emphasis on how social structures interpenetrate individual actions, social sciences offer additional insights that go beyond the identification of barrier-drivers underlying investment choices and also help to identify positive opportunities for renovation within the conditions of domestic and social life. Until recently, comprehensive behavioral aspects and the social dimension of home energy renovation have been ignored in policy initiatives, and the integration of complementary disciplines is only in its early stages. Based on a broad literature review, this paper aims to provide an up-to-date interdisciplinary perspective of the theoretical evolutionary background, which has been the support to gradually redefine and address the problems associated with energy improvements in homes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From a Techno-Economic towards a Socio-Technical Approach—A Review of the Influences and Policies on Home Energy Renovations’ Decisions

2023

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“…The result is no longer a single number as obtained from standard LCA but a cloud of possible solutions (Figure 1). The concept proved particularly powerful for applying to large data sets and to inform decision-makers, e.g., to identify overarching trends and tipping points of choices in the context of national or international regulations [11]. However, in the early design stage, the application of scenario-based robustness assessments is less feasible due to the effort and expert knowledge required and therefore, to date, has found little application in practice and teaching.…”

Section: Ghg Emission Assessment In the Built Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The GHG Emission Timeline – Integrating sustainability assessment into the early building design stage

Hischier,

Walker,

Piccioni

et al. 2023

J. Phys.: Conf. Ser.

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To address the challenges of integrating sustainability assessment such as life cycle assessment (LCA) in the early building design stage, we propose a new concept: The Greenhouse gas (GHG) Emission Timeline. The concept is derived from researching robustness assessment methods and personal experiences from teaching. Rather than aggregating environmental aspects into a single number, with the Timeline we want to highlight the temporality of GHG emissions in the context of ongoing transformation processes. Similarly to the previously proposed Material Pyramid for comparing the CO2 footprint of different materials, the Timeline is a pedagogical tool to visualize quantities, dynamics, and uncertainties aiming to provide a common ground for discussing sustainability in the early building design stage. The Timeline is compiled in a few simple steps with readily available resources. Hence, it does not need prior expert knowledge. The concept, as well as the first application examples of the Timeline from an architectural design studio at ETH Zurich are presented and discussed. By using GHG emission calculations for the compilation of a historic timeline, students created new lenses that addressed sustainability from a holistic viewpoint beyond GHG emissions.

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“…Highlighting the necessity of decarbonization strategies in building stock, (Walker et al, 2022) investigated the robustness of different retrofit strategies in six European contexts. Results confirmed that the performance of a certain retrofit strategy is considerably context-sensitive.…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The building is often contextualized by its geographic location (Starzyńska-Grześ et al, 2023), which is a critical information for environmental design goals, by specifying the surroundings and the local climate (Quan et al, 2014). Attention has been drawn to investigating the impact of context and inter-building relationships on building retrofit strategies and energy use ( (Walker et al, 2022), (Pisello et al, 2012), (Pisello et al, 2014), and (Ascione et al, 2020)). However, efforts are highly scarce in evaluating the potential impacts of the building's surrounding on the internal space layout.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Micro-Climate Building Context Visualization

Mostafavi,

Khademi

2023

eCAADe Proceedings

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Residential buildings are responsible for a considerable share of energy consumption and carbon emission. To decarbonize by 2050, as agreed in the Paris Climate Accord, immediate action for lowering the environmental impact of the building sector is needed. Environmental building design is a promising path, particularly during the early-stage design when design decisions are more impactful and long-lasting. One of the initial steps in the building design process is site assessment, during which the building context and environmental factors are to be evaluated. The surrounding environment plays a critical role in the building's energy performance and the thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort of its occupants. We choose quantitative approaches to study the complexity of the environmental design with respect to the building context by analyzing environmental cues embedded in architectural drawings that have been given less attention in previous studies. Nevertheless, disclosing site-specific geolocation data of buildings, more specifically residential type, is often challenging due to privacy issues. Therefore, there is a lack of context-related metadata in the current architectural datasets. Whereas simulation data are more available and provide a wealth of contextual information, however, it is less appealing for architects to interpret design patterns from extensive simulation figures. This research focuses on developing an interpretable visualization of the building's micro-climate context from environmental simulation data without direct access to the geolocation of the site. The environmental context visualization is created from daylight, view, and noise from 3088 multifamily housing presented in the Swiss Buildings data set, merely based on available simulation data. The presented pipeline in this study facilitates the employment of existing simulation data in the built environment datasets while circumventing the concerns associated with geolocation data exposure. Further, the generated visualizations may be used to develop computer vision models for environmental assessments of building layout design.

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Does context matter? Robust building retrofit decision-making for decarbonization across Europe

Cited by 11 publications

References 43 publications

From a Techno-Economic towards a Socio-Technical Approach—A Review of the Influences and Policies on Home Energy Renovations’ Decisions

From a Techno-Economic towards a Socio-Technical Approach—A Review of the Influences and Policies on Home Energy Renovations’ Decisions

The GHG Emission Timeline – Integrating sustainability assessment into the early building design stage

Micro-Climate Building Context Visualization

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