Bottom-up characterization of the Spanish building stock – Archetype buildings and energy demand

Abstract

The largest potential for energy efficiency improvements lies in retrofitting existing buildings. With the aim of meeting this challenge, a methodology that represents the European building stock as reference buildings has been developed to assess potential energy saving measures. This work is part of the project “Pathways to Sustainable European Energy Systems“. The model applied is the Energy Assessment for Buildings Stocks (EABS) which gives the net energy demand in an aggregated form for the building stock considered. The present work is an attempt to provide an appropriate and accurate characterization of the Spanish building stock to be used in the above mentioned bottom-up energy modeling. The work also serves as a test on the adequacy of applying a bottom-up methodology on a south European country including the non-residential sector. The characterization of the building stock includes the definition of archetype (reference) buildings representative of the building stock, taking into account the inputs of the EABS model. Using the archetype buildings as input, the EABS model is used to simulate the net annual energy demand for the year 2005 and 2008. The results, that contain data of the buildings’ net energy demand for space heating, cooling, electricity and hot water, are compared to data available in national and international sources expressed in terms of final energy. Modifications and adjustments are made in the building description process in order to match the results obtained with the ones available in the available sources. The Spanish building stock is represented by 120 archetype buildings corresponding to 6 building typologies, 5 climate zones and 4 periods of construction. The results of the modeling give a total energy demand for the non-residential sector of 102TWh and 113TWh for the year 2005 and 2008 respectively. Such figures are considered satisfactory since they only differ with 2-3% and 0-6% (higher) from the corresponding ones given in the international databases GAINS, Eurostat, IEA and the national institution IDAE. Regarding the residential sector, an annual total energy demand of 202TWh and 259TWh for 2005 and 2008 was obtained. These figures are about 40% higher than the ones available in the above-mentioned databases. The reasons for this difference are discussed in this master thesis.