Refurbishment of buildings, climate change impact on the reliable optimization of a residential building in Italy

Recently the European Parliament Approved the recast of Energy Performance for Buildings Directive (EPBD) which aims for zero emissions buildings by 2050 with a strong impulse to renovation of buildings across Europe especially the ones with poor energy performance. However, building renovation is a complex activity which involves technical and economic issues and a successful result comes from a difficult balance between costs and performance. Moreover, climate change can affect outcomes in the long term and should be considered.
The common practice is to compute the performances of the refurbished building referring to the actual climatic data, without considering its possible future evolutions, this approach can lead to future performances quite different from the ones assumed during the design phase. This presentation investigates the effects of data uncertainty in an optimization process applied to the refurbishment of a residential building in Trieste, focusing on the effects produced by climate change and by the evolution of the economic situation through the research of robust solutions. The results highlight that the economic and energetic performances of the refurbished building are strongly related to the different climatic datasets and future scenarios considered.