Refurbishment and electrification in the hotel sector: four hotels in the historic centre of Rome

Abstract

According to the European Renovation Wave, the European building stock is obsolete and changes very slowly: more than 220 million housing units and 85-95% of the existing buildings will still be in use in 2050 and are absolutely not energy efficient. To cut emissions by 55% by 2030, the EU should reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings by 60%, their final energy consumption by 14% and energy consumption for heating and cooling by 18%. It is therefore urgent for the EU to focus on making buildings more energy efficient, less carbon intensive throughout their life cycle and more sustainable. From this framework comes the need for an adaptation not only of residential buildings but also of hotel facilities, which, on a national scale, make up about 45% of the accommodation facilities. In particular, the offer of accommodation facilities must be constantly adequate and the structures must be upgraded so that they always remain usable and comply with current regulations from the accessibility, seismic-structural and energy point of view. In this research, four hotels located in the historic centre of Rome have been analysed as case studies. Starting from an analysis of the current state, a series of interventions on the building envelope and systems have been studied, evaluating energy savings and the reduction of polluting emissions. With regard to the systems, the total electrification of the heating and domestic hot water preparation systems has been hypothesised, with the introduction of storage systems, also in view of participation in Demand Response programs.

Digital Twin solutions to historical building stock maintenance cycles

“…The tool able to offer a control opportunity for retrofit projects is the Digital Twin approach with Building Information Modelling (BIM) tools with 3D models defined as intelligent, able to establish relationships with the other components of the project, from the characteristics of the site, energy performance, the quality of lighting, the number of materials used and their properties, estimation of costs, etc. It is proposed to integrate the needs of the historical building stock's energy retrofit with the innovations offered by the Digital Twin information workflow, to create a digital document that contains all of the information, exploitable databases [40,41] and transformations that occurred over time on the individual building, as will be better described in the following paragraphs.…”