Combined geospatial and techno-economic analysis of deep building envelope retrofit

Abstract

In this study, the Swiss residential building stock model (SwissRes model) is used to conduct a geospatial analysis of the techno-economic potential of deep building envelope retrofit packages in Switzerland. Element and building characteristics of 8242 archetype buildings are combined with high-resolution spatio-temporal weather data. We estimate final energy demand before and after retrofit, while correcting for the energy performance gap. Levelized costs of energy savings are calculated in two ways, i.e. based on full costs and investment cost related only to thermal improvement of the envelope. Results show that, technically, a 57% reduction of the final energy demand for space heating could be achieved with the deep envelope retrofit. For full costs, less than 1% of these measures would be cost-effective, whereas for improvement costs nearly the full retrofit potential is cost-effective. We identified primarily rural and mountainous regions as well as historic city centres to show highest cost-effectiveness.