Energy Efficiency and Economic Viability as Decision Factors in the Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings

Abstract

The restoration of historical buildings often implies a change in the main use of the building so that it can once again become a part of people’s lives. Among the interventions needed to adapt the buildings to their new purpose, improving the energy performance is always a challenge due to their particular construction solutions and the influence that these improvements can have on their protected elements. The regulations in force in European Union (EU) member states leave a gap in how the energy performance evaluations in these types of buildings can be defined, and even exclude them from the process. However, rehabilitation of buildings is always seen as an opportunity, because it allows the building to once again be useful to society and play an important role in people’s lives. At the same time, it can also improve their performance and allow benefits to be gained from their use through a reduction in maintenance costs. In the rehabilitation process, the economic viability of the renovation plays a fundamental role which must be compared, in the case of protected buildings, to its impact on the architecture of the building. Since 2002, the EU has issued directives with the aim that countries should define objective methods to improve the energy performance of buildings and, in recent times, methods that demonstrate the amortization of such improvements. Within the process of implementing the new methodologies adapted to the EPBD, Spain was one of the last EU countries to define a process for the energy assessment of existing buildings, introducing an analysis of the economic viability of the construction improvements suggested in the process. The objective of this research was to describe the decision-making process during the evaluation of the feasibility of introducing construction improvements to the energy performance of two catalogued historic buildings located in a warm climate. The estimated energy consumption was evaluated, the net present value (NPV) and the payback period of the investment calculated, and the results obtained were compared with the real energy consumption. At the end of the process, it can be said that the methodologies adopted in Spain offer results that can lead designers to make wrong decisions that may affect the protected heritage values of these buildings.

Attitudes matter: Measuring the intention-behaviour gap in built heritage conservation

“…In specific for built heritage, behaviour is frequently mentioned as a synonym of "performance", referring to physical characteristics of the building. While in the construction sector, in general, there is raising awareness of the role of occupants' behaviour for sustainability and energy efficiency (Caro & Sendra, 2020;Chen, Ding, Bai, & Sun, 2020;Gianfrate, Piccardo, Longo, & Giachetta, 2017;Laaroussi, Bahrar, El Mankibi, Draoui, & Si-Larbi, 2020), in the specific field of built heritage, occupants' behaviour is only mentioned as a factor that affects performance, without a more in-depth analysis of the underlying socio-psychological factors (Ajzen, 1985;Berg & Donarelli, 2019;Galiano-Garrigós, González-Avilés, Rizo-Maestre, & Andújar-Montoya, 2019;Mutani, Todeschi, Kämpf, Coors, & Fitzky, 2018). A systematic literature review on behaviour and heritage conservation found no results targeting practitioners' behaviour towards the implementation of sustainable conservation practices (Gonçalves et al, 2020).…”

Going beyond Good Intentions for the Sustainable Conservation of Built Heritage: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Despite the variety of stakeholders involved in the complex processes of building conservation, no significant number of studies were found analysing their behaviours leading to the implementation (or not) of planned intentions. Occupants' behaviour is an exception in the building and construction sector and it is often referred to by its impact on the energy performance of buildings [217][218][219][220][221][222]. However, the literature review points occupant behaviour as a factor-one of several things that influence the results, but not as the core of the detailed analysis.…”

Can Enhancing Efficiency Promote the Economic Viability of Smallholder Farmers? A Case of Sierra Leone

“…The inter-relatedness of economic viability and efficiency is long recognized in economics literature [26]. There is a renewed interest in the joint-estimation of economic viability and efficiency in sustainability studies on various fields including energy [42], and agriculture [43,44]. Therefore, the best model should be the one that considers the metafrontier efficiency as a latent variable to reproductive threshold representing economic viability.…”