Energy Audit and Multi-criteria Decision Analysis to Identify Sustainable Strategies in the University Campuses: Application to Politecnico di Torino

Universities play a headship role among entities that invest in technological progress and intend to increase education in sustainable culture towards a post-carbon society. With this in mind, Politecnico di Torino is a leader on the national and international scene. It has prepared sustainability lines for the next few years to translate the Sustainable Development Goals into concrete actions. The goal of this work is the evaluation of eight alternative energy efficiency scenarios resulting from the combination of different strategies for the retro!t of the University Campus of Politecnico di Torino. In the first part of the study, the alternatives are assessed in terms of energy performance. Subsequently, an economic evaluation supported by the multi-criteria TOPSIS method makes it possible to order the alternatives according to the opinion of several experts. The integrated evaluation allows considering a set of co-benefits generated by the project going behind the energy aspects. The best strategy involves covering electricity needs with renewable energy sources, adopting students’ engagement policies and optimizing the set-point temperature. The results highlight how low-cost solutions such as awareness campaigns and variation of the set-point temperature can bring signi!cant co-benefits from energy, economic, environmental and social perspectives.