EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Evaluation of cost-effective building retrofit strategies through soft-linking a metamodel-based Bayesian method and a life cycle cost assessment method

Jun Yuan, Victor Nian and Bin Su

Applied Energy, 2019, vol. 253, issue C, -

Abstract: The building sector contributes a major proportion of the global energy consumptions and carbon emissions. The energy performance or efficiency of buildings can be improved through a wide range of retrofitting measures which can have very different costs. Under budget, time and other resource constraints, it is not practical to apply all energy saving measures to a given retrofitting project. As such, there is a need to rank and select the most cost-effective measures to meet efficiency improvement goals. Traditionally, energy efficiency improvement measures and their costs are evaluated separately which makes prioritising among the measures difficult. In response, an integrated approach by soft-linking a metamodel-based Bayesian method and a life cycle cost assessment method is proposed to rank and select the most cost-effective retrofitting measures. The metamodel-based method is used to compute building energy consumptions before and after retrofit; and the cost-assessment method is used to evaluate the life cycle cost of implementing each measure. A selection of nine retrofitting measures are ranked according to life cycle energy savings, life cycle cost, and cost-effectiveness (measured by cost per unit energy saved). Findings from the Singapore case study suggest that retrofitting building envelop is the third least cost-effective measure although it can lead to highest energy savings. Lighting replacement has the least life cycle energy savings, but it is the most cost-effective measure. Electricity price has little influence on the cost-effectiveness ranking of all nine measures but discount rates (tested for 4%, 7% and 12%) can influence the ranking of home appliances. Based on the findings from the case study, the proposed integrated approach can help identify an optimum retrofit strategy and the cost of achieving energy efficiency targets for existing buildings.

Keywords: Building energy retrofit; Cost effectiveness; Energy efficiency; Metamodel; Bayesian model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261919312474
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:appene:v:253:y:2019:i:c:77

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2019.113573

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:eee:appene:v:253:y:2019:i:c:77