Protocol for assessing energy performance to improve comfort conditions in social housing in a Spanish southern city

Abstract

Current energy policies focus on cutting on energy consumption in buildings and standardizing the construction process to meet H2020 requirements. Indeed, retrofitting current buildings is a major issue to be addressed. An analysis of the composition of the housing stock is needed to develop any sort of improving action in these buildings. New energy policies that may appear in the following years could benefit from detailed information of the current state of existing residential buildings. The present paper is aimed to show a protocol to increase and implement the knowledge on social housing current state in southern Spain for further passive energy retrofitting interventions, which could allow for an improvement in indoor conditions too. To this aim, a top-down protocol is proposed to improve comfort conditions in social housing. A first phase corresponding to the creation of a GIS database is used to analyse social housing from an urban scale. Typologies and constructive characteriza- tion, energy assessment and a statistical approach is developed. This will allow for the acknowledgement of the most representative social dwellings in the city. A second phase, which corresponds to a dwelling scale, is thought to assess energy performance and the evolution of indoor environmental parameters in the previously selected dwellings, by in situ data measures and records, and the energy gradation of the dwellings by means of energy simulation software tools. This analysis will serve to propose integrated passive-energy solutions to retrofit thermal envelopes and to improve comfort conditions in social hous- ing. The mentioned protocol is applied to the social housing stock that was built between 1950 and 1980 in Córdoba, a city from the south of Spain with Mediterranean weather conditions.