Energy efficiency and seismic resilience: A common approach

Abstract

To the present date, building retrofit and enhancement interventions tend to focus on either energy efficiency or seismic resilience techniques, highlighting the lack of consistent language and understanding across both fields, as well as the disconnection among stakeholders that arises from the development of seismic risk mitigation independently of sustainable development goals. Although extensive know-how can be identified in both areas, efforts for its joint consideration presented in the literature are based on the evaluation of environmental impacts of expected repairs due to seismic action over a period of time, neglecting the potential of energy efficiency enhancements and, more importantly, the possible benefits of an integrated investment strategy. This chapter presents a proposal for the integrated assessment of energy efficiency and earthquake resilience, according to which environmental and seismic impact metrics are translated into common financial decision-making variables. In this context, similarly to what is a common practice when evaluating the energy and environmental performance of buildings, discrete classes of both earthquake resilience and energy efficiency are proposed, providing a consistent proxy for building classification-green and resilient indicator (GRI)-as a function of mutual performance parameters. The findings of this chapter highlight the fact that it is possible to directly compare energy efficiency and seismic resilience from a common point of view, as it is plausible to assume the green and resilient counterparts of the GRI classes as a proxy for investment return potential. In addition, it is verified that the benefit of a given intervention can only be maximized up to the point in which an additional investment does not result in increased performance. Thus, an integrated approach shall always be advantageous with respect to the investment in only earthquake resiliency or energy efficiency, devising an investment strategy in a way that simultaneously maximizes “individual” benefits and its integrated result.