Life cycle embodied and operational energy use in a typical, new Danish single-family house

For decades, increasing regulatory requirements on the energy performance of buildings have taken the building design to ever more technologically complex levels. A life cycle energy approach can be used to evaluate the savings in operational energy against the use of energy for producing, maintaining and discarding materials integrated in this complex building design. This life cycle energy study analyses how typical structural and technical solutions, used to comply with the Danish 2010, 2015 and 2020 operational energy requirements, differ in the life cycle energy use. In practice, three different building models were evaluated in terms of life cycle embodied and operational energy in a 100-year perspective. The results confirm the importance of the embodied impacts of contemporary low-energy buildings. The building’s embodied primary energy uses increase with stricter operational energy performance requirements because more insulation and technical equipment is needed in the building. However, the expenditure in embodied energy use is amply counterbalanced by the savings in primary energy from the reduced operational energy. This holds true as long as the energy scenario for the operational energy is calculated from a static 2015-mix of technologies.