An exploration of the relationship between improvements in energy efficiency and life-cycle energy and carbon emissions using the BIRDS low-energy residential database

To conduct a more complete analysis of low-energy and net-zero energy buildings that considers both the operating and embodied energy/emissions, members of the building community look to life-cycle assessment (LCA) methods This paper examines differences in the relative impacts of cost-optimal energy efficiency measure combinations depicting residential buildings up to and beyond net-zero energy consumption on operating and embodied flows using data from the Building Industry Reporting and design for Sustainability (BIRDS) Low-Energy Residential Database. Results indicate that net-zero performance leads to a large increase in embodied flows (over 40%) that offsets some of the reductions in operational flows, but overall life-cycle flows are still reduced by over 60% relative to the state energy code. Overall, building designs beyond net-zero performance can partially offset embodied flows with negative operational flows by replacing traditional electricity generation with solar production, but would require an additional 8.34 kW (18.54 kW in total) of due south facing solar PV to reach net-zero total life-cycle flows. Such a system would meet over 239% of operational consumption of the most energy efficient design considered in this study and over 116% of a state code-compliant building design in its initial year of operation.