Conference Paper

Proceedings of Building Simulation 2021: 17th Conference of IBPSA

Evaluating the regional implications of income-aware building stock retrofit strategies through constrained multi-objective optimization

Vincenzo Antonio Rossi, Bianca Howard, Jonathan Wright
Loughborough University, United Kingdom

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26868/25222708.2021.30375
Abstract: Retrofitting the existing building stock is one of the most effective solutions to reduce carbon emissions. Interventions at a stock scale, however, are not successful unless they are also socially sustainable. Previous work hardly considered both the physical and sociodemographic attributes analytically combined, focusing only indirectly on emission reduction. This study investigates how the differences among sociodemographic attributes and physical characteristics of different regional scenarios will change the trade-offs between cost and greenhouse gas emission as well as which measures should be implemented to achieve the reductions. A publicly available national housing dataset was used to populate a parametric model to run dynamic energy simulations. Retrofit measures are applied and optimized through a genetic algorithm at a stock scale, introducing socio-economical derived constraints to avoid fuel poverty, for the North East, the East Midlands and the London region in the UK. Results show that an overestimation of the emission reduction is possible when the social context is not considered, up to 48% for the North East region. Also, the regional income distribution is not the only parameter that determines the affordability of retrofit measures, but it has to be combined with the current state of the building stock to achieve tailored solutions.
Keywords: retrofit, optimization, sociodemographic, building stock, social sustainability
Pages: 159 - 166
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