Research and practice: Life cycle assessment of energy-efficiency refurbishment
When considered from an ecological perspective, using a life cycle assessment (LCA), energy-efficient refurbishments of buildings pay for themselves. In order to verify this claim, this article considers various refurbishment options on a multi-storey residential building from the 1960s. Furthermore, refurbishment options are compared with the alternative of demolishing buildings and constructing them from scratch. The building under focus represents the particular era of buildings that have the greatest cumulative energy savings potential in Germany: namely apartment buildings built between 1949 and 1968, which account for around a third of the existing German building stock and consume the highest amount of energy [11].
