Analysis of strategies to decarbonise the UK housing stock

The purpose of this Thesis is to revise the adoption of strategies for both new and existing housing towards the reduction of carbon emissions associated to energy demand, particularly by identifying promising technical improvements, as well as by capturing potential incentives to adopt these improvements. The case of housing is particularly interesting because although it is straightforward to categorise each building, perhaps by its physical properties, it can be considered unique because of the quasi-random behaviour of their occupants which can be determined as collective (e.g. peer pressure influencing the installation of solar panels), circumstantial (e.g. local incentives or sales in efficient devices), biological (e.g. occupants needs according to age and health conditions), or cultural (e.g. habits and patterns). It is also interesting because domestic buildings—or dwellings—represent a starting point in which our decisions to improve energy demand are taken, specially because these are biased by the exercise of rights and privileges, which do not necessarily comply with inhabitant’s comfort and satisfaction. The Thesis describes the development of an open-source platform for energy simulation, and its subsequent application in the development and testing of strategies to reduce energy demand in dwellings. The platform summarises the steps taken for its systematic development, which consist of the optimisation of a database to generate archetypes, the conformation of richer archetypes with more useful variables, the generation of volumetric archetypes, the dynamic simulation of archetypes and, finally, the systematic evaluation of results. Under this protocol, the foundations for developing scenarios are established in this work. This Thesis summarises the relevant elements that must be considered to improve robustness in the development of strategies to improve energy conservation and to reduce energy demand in dwellings. It also identifies those points that should be considered promptly in the future, and concludes with the vitality of this project for the participation of multiple disciplines and the use of new paradigms of work that today are paramount