Description of the European building stock through archetype buildings

Paper in proceeding, 2013

This paper presents a methodology for systematic description of the EU building stock through archetype buildings with the aim to form a basis for analysing the potential for and cost of energy saving measures. The analysis includes the residential and non-residential sectors. Four countries in different climate regions, accounting for about half of the final energy consumption of EU-27 buildings, have been selected for the study, namely: France, Germany, Spain and UK. The number of archetypes per country has been defined corresponding to different categories of building type, construction year, climate region and main fuel source for heating. The accuracy of the description is validated by simulating energy demand with the building stock model ECCABS, and comparing the modelled final energy demand with corresponding data from statistics. The calculated total final energy demand for each country is within -9% and +3 % deviation from available statistics, which is considered satisfactory.