Building Archetypes Supporting the National Building Renovation Plan

The national building renovation plan is a key element in the recently approved version of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive. The plan will provide a comprehensive overview of the energy and environmental performance of both the residential and non-residential building stock. To achieve the objective of mapping the energy status of urban configurations, the exploitation of building typologies, representative of different climatic zones, building use categories, and construction periods, has shown to be a useful approach. The huge data uncertainty related to the building archetype generation necessitates a deeper analysis of the variation of crucial inputs that have repercussions on the energy performance assessment of the building stock. This work begins with the Urban Building Energy Model data classification aimed at identifying the fundamental inputs needed to run an urban large-scale energy analysis. Then, the paper proceeds with the review and categorisation of the existing Italian databases, exploitable to mitigate the high uncertainty related to the input data. Once the requisite information is collected and the databases classified, the application part progresses with the probabilistic building archetype schema generation from the energy performance certificates of the Aosta Valley Region, taken as a case study. A local large-scale sensitivity analysis, obtained varying one at a time the thermophysical parameters of the building fabric and the window-to-wall ratio of a residential stock located in Aosta, was carried out. The study highlights how variations in statistical ranges of inputs, particularly regarding the performance of opaque building envelope components, impact the assessment of building energy needs.