Heating Energy Consumption and Environmental Implications Due to the Change in Daily Habits in Residential Buildings Derived from COVID-19 Crisis: The Case of Barcelona, Spain

Marta Monzón-Chavarrías, Silvia Guillén-Lambea, Sergio García-Pérez, Antonio Luis Montealegre-Gracia and Jorge Sierra-Pérez
Additional contact information
Marta Monzón-Chavarrías: Department of Architecture, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain
Silvia Guillén-Lambea: University Center of Defense, University of Zaragoza, 50090 Zaragoza, Spain
Sergio García-Pérez: Department of Architecture, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain
Antonio Luis Montealegre-Gracia: GEOFOREST-IUCA Research Group, Department of Geography, University of Zaragoza, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Jorge Sierra-Pérez: Department of Design and Manufacturing Engineering, EINA, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-19

Abstract: The COVID-19 crisis has changed daily habits and the time that people spend at home. It is expected that this change may have environmental implications because of buildings’ heating energy demand. This paper studies the energy and environmental implications, from a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, due to these new daily habits in residential buildings at their current level of thermal insulation, and in different scenarios of thermal retrofit of their envelope. This study has a building-to-building approach by using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for the residential housing stock in the case of Barcelona, Spain. The results show that a change in daily habits derived from the pandemic can increase the heating energy consumption and carbon dioxide emission in residential buildings by 182%. Retrofitting all buildings of Barcelona, according to conventional energy renovation instead of nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEB), will produce between 2.25 × 10 7 and 2.57 × 10 7 tons of carbon dioxide. Retrofitting the building stock using energy recovery is the option with better energy and emission savings, but also is the option with higher payback time for buildings built until 2007. The methodology presented can be applied in any city with sufficient cadastral data, and is considered optimal in the European context, as it goes for calculating the heating energy consumption.

Keywords: COVID-19; GIS; LCA; urban scale; user behaviour; nZEB renovation; energy retrofit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/2/918/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/2/918/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:2:p:918-:d:482213

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().