Date of Award

8-26-2019

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Keywords

Climate Change, Energy Retrofits, Infrastructure, Life Cycle Assessment, Sustainability

Supervisor

Tam, E.

Supervisor

Ruparathna, R.

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

With current increasing climate change concerns, enhancing infrastructure sustainability is essential to the help mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Today, 45% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to the production of heat and electricity for buildings. Green building energy retrofits are useful to help decrease the energy consumption of a building and resulting emissions from a building. Before applying energy retrofits, evaluating their sustainability is important but can be challenging without the proper tools due to the many factors that need to be taken into consideration. Furthermore, life cycle thinking is crucial when making decisions on building retrofits implementation, and life cycle assessments are a valuable tool to help conduct sustainability evaluations. This research project aims to create a comprehensive methodology that will assess and compare building retrofits through life cycle thinking and the evaluation of environmental, economic, social and technical criteria. Appropriate key performance indicators are chosen for each criterion along with the development of a life cycle impact database. Overall, this research creates a comprehensive Microsoft Excel-based tool which may be used by building managers or stakeholders to determine the optimal energy retrofit.

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