Sustainability assessment of energy saving measures: A multi-criteria approach for residential buildings retrofitting—A case study of the Spanish housing stock

Abstract

Please cite this article as: O. Pombo, K. Allacker, B. Rivela, J. Neila, Sustainability assessment of energy saving measures: a multi-criteria approach for residential buildings retrofittingndashA case study of the Spanish housing stock, Energy and Buildings (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10. 1016/j.enbuild.2016.01.019 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Page 1 of 30A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t The building sector is well known to be one of the key energy consumers worldwide. The renovation of existing buildings provides excellent opportunities for an effective reduction of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions but it is essential to identify the optimal strategies. In this paper a multi-criteria methodology is proposed for the comparative analysis of retrofitting solutions. A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t far from being optimal solutions. The required additional investment, which is needed to obtain an overall performance improvement of the envelope compared with the common practice to date, is relatively low (8%) considering the obtained life cycle environmental and financial savings (43% and 45% respectively).

Application of the cost-optimal methodology to urban renewal projects at the territorial scale based on statistical data—A case study in Spain

“…In terms of scale, we observe that a majority of applications of the methodology have been at the building or component scale, especially to compare different constructive solutions and construction materials or to optimize the insulation thicknesses of the building envelope [8,12,32,33,[37][38][39][40][41][42]. When at the building scale, studies typically consider only one specific typology for a given period of time or year (e.g.…”

“…Initially, this methodology was proposed by the EU to study different building retrofitting scenarios. It consists in a multi-criteria assessment that allows comparing different levels of intervention under various macro-economic scenarios, in terms of cost-effective strategies and energy and environmental savings [8,12,17,22,[30][31][32][33].…”

Relevance of Embodied Energy and Carbon Emissions on Assessing Cost Effectiveness in Building Renovation—Contribution from the Analysis of Case Studies in Six European Countries

“…LCA has already been used in several studies focusing on building renovation (e.g., [19][20][21]), even if, according to a review by Cabeza et al [22], the majority of the studies have been performed in what the authors call "exemplary buildings", i.e., buildings that have been constructed already with the purpose of being sustainable and using low amounts of energy. In addition, studies taking an environmental assessment perspective of cost-optimal solutions for building renovation are scarce and geographically inconsistent.…”

Cost-effective analysis for selecting energy efficiency measures for refurbishment of residential buildings in Catalonia

“…In addition, there are also several scientific studies developed in Spain [13][14][15][16]. They cover different regions, the northern [13,15] and the southern [14], and all of them are focused on residential sector.…”

“…However, not all the studies implement the cost-optimal method but, they proposed other variables of decision: [15] included the payback period as additional parameter for the economical evaluation; [14] used the construction costs and the CO 2 emissions to analysed the impact of different building legislations; and [13,16] implemented the Life Cycle Cost and the Life Cycle Impact Assessment.…”