Energy performance of an existing office building in the northern part of Italy: Retrofitting actions and economic assessment

In recent years, the interest of the scientific community towards building energy performance has become more evident in order to meet the National and European Directives. In this context, retrofits that result in improved building energy performance are widely investigated. The paper presents a comparative analysis of two different and complementary strategies to enhance the energy performance of an existing tertiary building located in Bologna, Italy. The first retrofit action is to reduce the heat transfer by transmission (i.e. use of low-emissivity glass) and the second one is to decrease the ventilation losses (i.e. installation of a heat recovery system). Then a third case has been investigated: it contemplates simultaneously both the solutions of windows replacement and installing a ventilation recovery system. Potential energy savings were calculated by means of dynamic simulation assisted by Trnsys energy simulation tool. Finally, an evaluation of the simple payback time and the net present value was performed in order to investigate global cost assessment. The window replacement option in the analyzed building office proved to be absolutely unprofitable, even if it would appear as the first and simplest action to be performed. On the contrary, the installation of a total energy recovery system resulted in sensible reduction of energy consumption and at the same time generated good values of NPV with reference to all the three different analyzed variation of the cost of energy.