Innovative building technologies and technical equipment towards sustainable construction – a comparative LCA and LCC assessment

Sustainability assessments of buildings have becom e more and more common. They include the assessment of environmental and eco nomic performance. However, th e influence of construction technologies and their technical building equipment as well as the way in which they vary depend-
ing on different energetic standards have not been de scribed systematically in literature. For this reason, we evaluated the influe nce of these aspects and the im pact on the environmental and economic performance of residential buildings. The life cycle performance of 45 variants of a re sidential building was evaluated by applying the methodology of life cycle assessment (LCA) and lif e cycle costing (LCC) using quantitative assessment indicators proposed by the current Eu ropean framework (EN 15643). The variants consist of four main construction types (brick, concrete, wood-chip concrete and prefab timber wood
construction) in combination with different energetic standards (low to plus energy) and different technical building systems (pellets, heat pump, solar heating and pho tovoltaic). This led to a model that displays the existing technical variety. The comprehensive results show a high optimisat ion potential for the life cycle performance of buildings in general. However, va riation of the technical build ing equipment and energy standards lead to a higher improvement potential then the us e of different construc tion techniques. Results also indicate that the use of a plus energy standard does not prove to be optimal in all cases.