Sensitivity of buildings’ carbon footprint to electricity decarbonization: a life cycle–based multi-objective optimization approach

Abstract

Abstract Purpose Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a widely used method for the evaluation of buildings’ environmental impacts, but these analyses contain high levels of uncertainty. Decarbonization of electricity production is key to reach climate goals, influencing all sectors including construction The objective of this paper is to study the sensitivity of the environmentally optimum building design solution to a changing electricity mix to assist decision-making. Methods In this paper, multi-objective optimization was applied to minimize the life cycle global warming potential and life cycle costs of a building at the same time, using dynamic energy simulation and LCA. The variables include building envelope parameters such as window ratio, insulation type and thickness in a typical new multi-family apartment building heated with a heat pump. A static, largely fossil-based electricity mix and a dynamic, gradually decarbonizing alternative are considered, as well as two electricity price increase scenarios. New metrics have been introduced to explore the results and describe the Pareto-optimal solutions, for example the improvement potential to contextualize the achievements through the optimization. Results and discussion The results show that, with the current electricity mix, building envelope optimization can improve the design by 18% on average in terms of the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions compared to typical new designs and by 10% with a dynamic mix in Hungary. With today’s static electricity mix, the optimization proved that the minimum energy efficiency requirements in force are close to cost optimality. However, from an environmental point of view, much higher insulation thicknesses have been shown as justified ( U -values of less than 0.1 W/m 2 K). Conclusions Optimization of building design based on LCA is still not widely applied and the effect of a decarbonizing electricity mix on the optimum has not been studied before. The results of the paper demonstrate the importance of this question. Optimal solutions are different depending on the applied mix but an energy-efficient building envelope remains important: today’s cost-optimal building envelope proves to be both cost- and environmentally optimal in the long run.

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