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

Abstract

In developed economies, such as the European Union’s member states, the largest potential for energy efficiency improvements lies in retrofitting existing buildings. Yet, there is both a lack of information about the building stock and associated modelling tools that can be used to assess such measures as basis for develop energy efficiency strategies and design policies to be applied to the European building sector. Therefore, a methodology has been developed that represents the European building stock as reference buildings with the aim to assess the effects of energy saving measures. The model used for the building energy simulation is the Energy Assessment for Buildings Stocks (EABS), which gives the net energy demand in an aggregated form for the building stock considered. This master thesis focuses on the Spanish building stock and continues the development of the methodology that has earlier been tested using the Swedish residential stock as base. In this master thesis, archetype (reference) buildings are defined to characterise the building stock and are used as inputs to the EABS model. The work also serves to test the adequacy of applying a bottom-up methodology on a south European country where also the non-residential sector is included. The results, which present data of the buildings’ net energy demand for space heating, cooling, electricity and hot water, are compared to statistical 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 reference statistical databases. The Spanish building stock is represented by 120 archetype buildings corresponding to six building typologies, five climate zones and four periods of construction. The results of the simulation give a total energy demand for the residential sector of 181 TWh for the year 2005, which is considered satisfactory since it only differs with 3% compared to the statistics provided by the international databases GAINS and Eurostat. Regarding the non-residential sector 91 TWh of total energy demand were obtained from the energy simulation for the year 2005, which is about 7% lower than the energy demand given in GAINS and Eurostat. Corresponding simulation for the year 2008 yields an annual energy demand of 218 TWh and 101 TWh for the residential and non-residential sector respectively. Such figures are around 19% higher and 10% lower than the corresponding energy demands given in the international databases Eurostat, IEA and the national institution IDAE. Possible reasons for these differences are discussed in this master thesis.