The work of this thesis was undertake to address an urgent need to describe the European building stock, so as to allow future assessments of the effects of different energy-saving measures. The available information on building stocks in Europe is very limited. In this respect, this work contributes to the compilation of a European building stock database. The French building stock is described in this thesis by means of archetype buildings, following a methodology that was developed earlier within the Pathways Project . A bottom-up approach is used for this description, starting with segmentation of the building stock into archetype buildings, followed by characterization of these buildings and quantification of all the buildings represented by the archetype buildings. These archetype buildings are used as inputs for the Energy, Carbon and Cost Assessment for Building Stocks (ECCABS) simulation tool, to calculate the energy demand (for heating, hot water, and electricity) of the stock. The resulting energy demand is thereafter compared to the values for energy consumption in France, obtained from statistical databases, to validate the method. In this thesis, we estimate that 54 residential buildings and 45 non-residential archetype buildings would be needed to describe the entire French building stock. The calculated final energy demand (disregarding the energy used for cooking) is 435.7 TWh/year for the residential sector and non-residential 179.4 TWh/year for the non-residential sector. These values are slightly lower (between 1.1% and 7.4% lower) than those in the official statistics. It is concluded that the French building stock can be described using the data available in the literature and the applied methodology. In addition, it is demonstrated that the ECCABS model is suitable for application to a temperate climate country, such as France.

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