A gis-based approach for the energy analysis and life cycle assessment of urban housing stocks
Authors
A. Mastrucci, A. Marvuglia, E. Benetto, and U. Leopold
Reference
in Expanding boundaries: systems thinking in the built environment, ISBN:978-3-7281-3774-6, pp. 280-285, 2016
Description
Buildings are responsible for 40% of the final energy use and one third of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. At the city scale, a quantitative assessment of the environmental impact of buildings is essential to support sustainable energy policies. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been widely used to assess building related environmental impacts; however, its extension to the urban scale is still hampered by several operational challenges. Coupling LCA and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has been identified as a promising solution but developments are still needed.
This paper presents an automated approach for the energy modelling and LCA of urban housing stocks based on GIS. The main steps of the approach are the following: (i) GIS-based building stock characterization; (ii) automated building-by-building energy analysis; (iii) Environmental impact calculation via LCA. The approach was applied to the test case city Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg) to assess the potential environmental impact reduction driven by housing retrofitting.
Results were provided building-by-building and displayed as maps for improved communication. An energy savings potential of 35.3% and a Global Warming Potential (GWP) reduction of 30.8% were calculated as results of retrofitting. The average contribution of the retrofitting stage on the residual life of the building stock is 4 to 10% of the GWP, depending on the building type.
The study provided one of the first models able to perform a fully-fledged LCA of buildings at the urban scale in a bottom-up fashion. The results are meant to support local authorities in setting priority strategies for environmental impact reduction.
