Economic and environmental optimization of deep energy renovation strategies for an office building in Sweden

Energy efficiency of the building sector is a key strategy to achieve national climate goals in Sweden and other European countries. In this thesis, several renovation scenarios for a case study office building in Sweden are analysed and compared based on their energy performance, environmental impacts, and economic costs from a life cycle perspective. As a baseline, the case study building was simulated in IDA ICE and compared with the simulated renovation scenarios. For the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and the Life Cycle Costs (LCC), the commercially available software OneClickLCA was used. The renovation scenarios were carried out over three rounds: (i) material type scenarios where five insulation materials (glass wool, rock wool, hemp fiber, Expanded Polystyrene (EPS), and Extruded Polystyrene (XPS)) and two frame materials (wood and steel) are compared; (ii) insulation thickness optimization from economic and environmental performance perspectives (iii) comparison of combination with other typical renovation measures such as changing of windows, improving specific fan power, heat exchanger efficiencies, and lightings. The results show that glass wool gives the most economical and environmental performance, followed by rock wool and EPS. When considering other environmental indicators, hemp fiber presents the best environmental option. However, it is not competitive with traditional insulation materials from an economic perspective. The insulation thickness scenarios show different optimal economic and environmental performance points, giving total energy savings of 5 % and 9,5 %, respectively. When considering other typical energy efficiency measures, the highest impact on the energy performance was found when improving the specific fan power (SFP) and switching to LED lights with total electricity reductions (including user-based electricity consumption) of 4 % and 14 %, respectively. Conclusively, the case study showed how the electricity and heating demand of the studied office building could be reduced, and the environmental and economic consequences of the different energy-efficiency measures.