The Urban Building Energy Retrofitting Tool: An Open-Source Framework to Help Foster Building Retrofitting Using a Life Cycle Costing Perspective—First Results for Montréal

Abstract

Highlights: What are the main findings? An open-source Urban Building Energy Model developed for the easy integration ofresearch in the urban sustainability fields has been developed by the Next GenerationCities Institute at Concordia University. What are the implications of the main findings? The paper proves its facility of use applying the framework to the development of a fastanalysis tool for retrofitting buildings, and applies it to the island of Montréal, showingpromising results. Building decarbonization is a major challenge for cities. Deciding which buildings to retrofit buildings, and when and how, is difficult, given the complex interaction between energy costs and investment requirements. Several tools have been developed in recent years to help public and private stakeholders with these decisions, but none cover aspects the authors think are fundamental. For this reason, an urban buildings retrofit tool was developed and is presented in this article. This new tool is based on a bottom-up approach, with all buildings simulated individually, considering aspects such as shading and adjacencies. As a second step, three scenarios with different levels of ambition were implemented in the tool, and the energy demand and emissions resulting from these scenarios were calculated. As a third step, the retrofitting scenarios’ initial investment and operational costs were implemented using a detailed Life Cycle Costing (LCC) approach. A robust and scalable structure was developed and applied to calculate the LCC of various retrofitting scenarios in Montréal, which will be described in detail.