A comprehensive approach to building-stock modelling - Assessing the impact of renovating urban housing stocks

Doctoral thesis, 2019

The existing building stock provide a possibility for cost-efficient energy efficiency measures
and related reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. As the rate of renewal in the buildingstock
is low, energy efficiency measures need to be applied when renovation is being done in
order to reach climate goals. To increase the renovation rate and realise the potential for
substantial reductions in energy use, several research and demonstration projects have been
carried out on both a European and Swedish level. In order to evaluate the current state and
renovation potential of the existing building stock on an urban level, a local approach is
needed to understand challenges and possibilities associated with the transformation of the
building-stock. To quantify the potential for reducing energy use and greenhouse-gas
emissions, building-stock modelling is commonly used. However, these models are often
based on using representative buildings and scaling factors. With increased spatial resolution,
building descriptions based on representative buildings lose accuracy and as a result,
stakeholders operating at a planning or policy level are commonly targeted. This study
proposes a building-specific stock description where each building is treated individually to
differentiate the renovation potential within the building-stock. For this purpose, available
databases containing building-specific information has been gathered and processed for the
multi-family building stock of the City of Gothenburg. The available data is used to create a
building-specific stock description and renovation measures are modelled using a bottom-up
engineering method and evaluated regarding energy use, environmental impact and costeffectiveness.
This thesis with appended papers shows that available data sources can be used
to describe the characteristics of the stock on a building level and model the effect of
renovation on energy use, environmental impact and cost-effectiveness in order to provide
detailed information to policy makers, planners and property owners.