Potential of mid-rise social residential buildings to reach net zero energy building standard in two different climates of Chile

Abstract

The Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) are a real solution to reduce the energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated by the building sector. Thus, many developed countries have conducted different studies for the development of public policies that encourage the implementation of NZEB. Chile adopted as environmental goal for the coming years reducing the GHG emissions by 30%, but the instruments to accomplish them have not been clearly defined. The NZEB might be a key strategy to reduce the GHG emissions. However, there are no studies that evaluate the performance of NZEB in Chile. The aim of this research is to determine the potential of mid-rise social residential buildings to reach the NZEB standard in Santiago and La Serena. In particular, mid-rise social buildings are selected as representative for this study through the use of a multi-criteria matrix. The electric consumption of buildings and photovoltaic production are simulated in EnergyPlus. The optimizations of the energy efficiency measures and the configurations of the photovoltaic systems are carried out in GenOpt. The results show that mid-rise social residential buildings are very close to reach the NZEB standard and through the optimized energy efficiency measures, the electric consumption of the building is reduced by up to 28%. Therefore, mid-rise social residential buildings have potential to reach NZEB standard but other measures must be studied.