Long-term evaluation of the energy consumption of 100 energy-efficient buildings in Austria

Abstract

In 2019, buildings greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions accounted for 21 % of global emissions, therefore regions such as Europe have strong policies to decrease such emissions. The literature shows different examples simulating energy refurbishment of buildings or districts where an important GHG reduction can be achieved, but there is a clear gap on real measurements of exemplary buildings. This paper shows an assessment of more than 100 energy-efficient buildings in Austria, showing that this GHG emissions reduction is really possible. The paper evaluates residential and non-residential buildings, where the energy consumption was 50 % below the consumption of typical multi-apartment buildings. Moreover, the emissions in such buildings were well below the Paris agreement targets.

This work was partially funded by the Austrian project LZE 100 Leuchtturmobjekte. The authors at University of Lleida would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group GREiA (2021 SGR 01615). GREiA is a certified agent TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia. This work is partially supported by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme. Dr. Ürge-Vorsatz and Dr. Chatterjee also received funding from the Energy Demand changes Induced by Technological and Social innovations (EDITS) project, which is part of the initiative coordinated by the Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE) and International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) (and funded by Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI), Japan). “