Life-cycle assessment of near zero energy buildings (NZEB) in comparison with regular new buildings

The EU Horizon 2020 (https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en) research project “Solution sets for the Cost reduction of new Nearly Zero-Energy Buildings – CoNZEBs” (www.conzebs.eu) started in June 2017. CoNZEBs will identify and assess technology solution sets that lead to significant cost reductions of new Nearly Zero-Energy Buildings in four EU member states:
Denmark, Germany, Italy and Slovenia. The focus of the project is on multi-family houses. The project will start by setting baseline costs for conventional new buildings, currently available NZEB and buildings that go beyond the NZEB level. The CoNZEBs project will end ultimo 2019.
The project will use the basic characteristics of NZEB to first identify technologies that can be made more cost-efficient if applied to NZEB. Secondly, these technologies will be combined into costefficient solution sets or concepts for NZEB. The technology solution sets will include approaches that can reduce costs for installations or generation systems, pre-fabrication and construction
acceleration, local low temperature district heating including renewable energy systems (RES), and many more.
All solution sets will be assessed regarding cost savings using life cycle costs (LCC) analysis, energy performance and applicability in multi-family houses. A life cycle environmental impact assessment (LCA) of different building levels and NZEB using the solution sets will provide a longer-term perspective. The results of the LCC and LCA analyses will be compared to those obtained for conventional buildings built according to current building regulations and conventionally built NZEB.
The paper presents the status of this work, which includes the definition of reference buildings, the identified solution sets and the first LCC and LCA calculations performed with ASCOT_LCA.