Life cycle approach in evaluating energy performance of residential buildings in Indian context

2012 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 259-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Ramesh ◽  
Ravi Prakash ◽  
K.K. Shukla
Buildings ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Daniel Satola ◽  
Martin Röck ◽  
Aoife Houlihan-Wiberg ◽  
Arild Gustavsen

Improving the environmental life cycle performance of buildings by focusing on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions along the building life cycle is considered a crucial step in achieving global climate targets. This paper provides a systematic review and analysis of 75 residential case studies in humid subtropical and tropical climates. The study investigates GHG emissions across the building life cycle, i.e., it analyses both embodied and operational GHG emissions. Furthermore, the influence of various parameters, such as building location, typology, construction materials and energy performance, as well as methodological aspects are investigated. Through comparative analysis, the study identifies promising design strategies for reducing life cycle-related GHG emissions of buildings operating in subtropical and tropical climate zones. The results show that life cycle GHG emissions in the analysed studies are mostly dominated by operational emissions and are the highest for energy-intensive multi-family buildings. Buildings following low or net-zero energy performance targets show potential reductions of 50–80% for total life cycle GHG emissions, compared to buildings with conventional energy performance. Implementation of on-site photovoltaic (PV) systems provides the highest reduction potential for both operational and total life cycle GHG emissions, with potential reductions of 92% to 100% and 48% to 66%, respectively. Strategies related to increased use of timber and other bio-based materials present the highest potential for reduction of embodied GHG emissions, with reductions of 9% to 73%.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hossein Omrany ◽  
Veronica Soebarto ◽  
Ehsan Sharifi ◽  
Ali Soltani

Residential buildings are responsible for a considerable portion of energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Correspondingly, many attempts have been made across the world to minimize energy consumption in this sector via regulations and building codes. The focus of these regulations has mainly been on reducing operational energy use, whereas the impacts of buildings’ embodied energy are frequently excluded. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in analyzing the energy performance of buildings via a life cycle energy assessment (LCEA) approach. The increasing amount of research has however caused the issue of a variation in results presented by LCEA studies, in which apparently similar case studies exhibited different results. This paper aims to identify the main sources of variation in LCEA studies by critically analyzing 26 studies representing 86 cases in 12 countries. The findings indicate that the current trend of LCEA application in residential buildings suffers from significant inaccuracy accruing from incomplete definitions of the system boundary, in tandem with the lack of consensus on measurements of operational and embodied energies. The findings call for a comprehensive framework through which system boundary definition for calculations of embodied and operational energies can be standardized.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2-4) ◽  
pp. 312-316
Author(s):  
Surnam Sonia Longo ◽  
Maurizio Cellura ◽  
Maria Anna Cusenza ◽  
Francesco Guarino ◽  
Ilaria Marotta

This paper aims at assessing the embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) of two building envelopes, designed for a two floors semi-detached house located in the Central Italy. The analysis is performed by applying the Life Cycle Assessment methodology, following a from cradle-to-gate approach. Fixtures (windows and doors), external and internal opaque walls, roof and floors (including interstorey floors) make the building envelopes. Their stratigraphy allows for achieving the thermal transmittance values established in the Italian Decree on energy performance of buildings. The two examined envelopes differ only for the insulation material: extruded expanded polystyrene (XPS) or cellulose fibers. The results shows that the envelope using cellulose fibers has better performance than that using XPS: it allows for reducing the embodied energy and the GHGs of about 13% and 9.3%, respectively. A dominance analysis allows to identify the envelope components responsible of the higher impacts and the contribution of the insulating material to the impacts. The study is part of the Italian research “Analysis of the energy impacts and greenhouse gas emissions of technologies and components for the energy efficiency of buildings from a life cycle perspective” funded by the Three-year Research Plan within the National Electricity System 2019-2021.


Author(s):  
Patxi Hernandez ◽  
Paul Kenny

Building energy performance regulations and standards around the world are evolving aiming to reduce the energy use in buildings. As we move towards zero energy buildings, the embodied energy of construction materials and energy systems becomes more important, as it represents a high percentage of the overall life cycle energy use of a building. However, this issue is still ignored by many regulations and certification methods, as happens with the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), which focuses on the energy used in operation. This paper analyses a typical house designed to comply with Irish building regulations, calculating its energy use for heating and how water with the Irish national calculation tool, which uses a methodology in line with the EPBD. A range of measures to reduce the energy performance in use of this typical house are proposed, calculating the reduced energy demand and moving towards a zero energy demand building. A life-cycle approach is added to the analysis, taking into account the differential embodied energy of the implemented measures in relation to the typical house base-case, annualizing the differential embodied energy and re-calculating the overall energy use. The paper discusses how a simplified approach for accounting embodied energy of materials could be useful in a goal to achieve the lowest life-cycle energy use in buildings, and concludes with a note on how accounting for embodied energy is a key element when moving towards zero energy buildings.


2020 ◽  
Vol 172 ◽  
pp. 18003
Author(s):  
Yanaika Decorte ◽  
Marijke Steeman ◽  
Nathan Van Den Bossche ◽  
Klaas Calle

The substantial contribution of buildings in the energy consumption and emissions renders the existing building stock a key element to tackle the climate crisis. Consequently, defining a deliberate decision-making process gains importance. Decisions are currently often based on building codes, budget, and in the best case Pareto optimality of the energy performance and the net present value of the life-cycle cost. The growing attention to sustainability, however, raises questions about the effect of environmental considerations on the outcome of the Pareto optimal solutions. This study quantifies the effect of including the environmental aspect as a third dimension to the current evaluation approach. Therefore, the most appropriate renovation measures are selected using a multidimensional Pareto optimization. The method is applied to a residential high-rise building in Belgium. Firstly, the Pareto front is constituted based on life-cycle costing and life-cycle assessment separately. Subsequently, the respective results are combined into an integrated life cycle approach by enumerating the LCA results as an external cost to the LCC results. The results show that the Pareto optimal solutions from a financial and environmental perspective do not coincide. Although the financial aspect dominates, adding the environmental cost eliminates low-performant financial optima, leading to optimal solutions with a larger insulation thickness.


2020 ◽  
Vol 207 ◽  
pp. 01014
Author(s):  
Nadezhda Doseva ◽  
Daniela Chakyrova

Nowadays, the application of air-source heat pumps for heating and cooling in residential buildings has been increased significantly. The main occasion for this is the accessibility of a heat source for these devices - the external air. Nevertheless, the increase of the energy efficiency of the air source heat pump systems is a difficult design problem because their capacity and performance are a function of the dynamically changing parameters of the outdoor air. Because of that, the main aim of this study is to develop an approach for choosing a structural scheme of an air-to-water heat pump system under specific climatic conditions. The considered systems are monovalent, bivalent-parallel and bivalent-alternative heat pump systems. In the current paper is conducted a dynamic energy modeling of heating and cooling demand of a typical residential building situated in Varna, Bulgaria and applying the bin temperature data. It is assessed the effect of the heat pump capacity over the annual and seasonal energy performance of the heat pump systems. It is established the effect of the bivalent temperature, cut-off temperature and on-off cycles duration on rates of the criteria for techno-economic assessment. The seasonal coefficient of performance (SCOP), seasonal energy efficiency rate (SEER) and life cycle costs (LCC) of the analyzed heat pump systems are adopted as assessment parameters.


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