NZEB Refurbishment: A Norwegian Case - Energy use and analysis of embodied energy of different insulations and envelope technology -

The energy use of the buildings is one of the most challenging problems that designer must deal with. This is due to the current climate changes that make the scientific research aware to analyse the factors that are not considered from the European energy code. This work will deal with a Refurbishment of an existing building block, where the main consideration is that a renovation in general consume less energy than the demolition and construction of a new building. However, a refurbished building in the current practice do not achieve the same energy use level of the new NZEBs or Low-energy buildings. For this reason, the first aim for this work is to show that is possible and important to achieve this result also in extreme cold temperature, indeed this work deal with the energy retrofitting of an apartment building in Oslo, Norway. In the first stage, this study will show the energy use during the operational life of the Building. It will be shown that the refurbishment with energy upgrade reaching the same energy use of new buildings is possible also in the extremely cold temperature. This stage will show the concept of the refurbishment fulfil the ZEB-O concept as defined from the currently studies in Norway. In the second stage, the study will compare different insulation solutions that have the same effect on the energy used by the building during the operational life, but have different thermal features, different production process and consequently different embodied energy. The comparison will be done between different insulations type because the insulation is one of the most used material for an energy upgrading. The results will show that including or not the embodied energy in the calculation the energy balance of the building will be very different. And this will be also affected from the insulation type. Indeed some insulations give as result small embodied energy and some other require big embodied energy respect the energy used during the operational life by the building. This stage will show the concept of the refurbishment fulfil the ZEB-OM concept as defined from the currently studies in Norway. The second stage will also include considerations about the PV panels’ embodied energy that are in need to fulfil the ZEB-OM concept for the proposed insulation alternatives for the retrofit.