Integration of a Europe-wide public building database with retrofit strategies and a thermal inertia model into an open-source optimization framework

Abstract

The building sector currently accounts for 40% of global energy consumption and one third of total greenhouse gas emissions, with a significant portion allocated to thermal energy supply. Achieving global climate goals requires the transition to renewables in energy supply systems. The cost efficiency first principle suggests that improving energy efficiency is a key measure on that way, which includes building envelope retrofits. Open-Source tools for optimization of building energy systems exist, e.g. the open energy system framework (oemof), a tool equipped with a comprehensive library of generic components that empowers energy system modeling and optimization. However, these tools typically lack the linkage between retrofit strategies and energy system optimization, do not consider the thermal inertia of the building in the operational optimization and require extensive input data. In this contribution, we present a new open-source feature of oemof that combines the 5RC thermal building model (based on ISO 13790) with the TABULA building database and makes them available for optimization workflows. This enables oemof to optimize the energy system design and operation, including the thermal inertia and controlling the indoor temperature within a comfort zone. The optimization is performed for three residential building retrofit states in hourly time steps with a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) approach. The chosen approach works with little input data for 20 European countries and allows the optimization of a wide range of residential buildings for three retrofit states. A case study demonstrates the applicability of the new method.