Predicting building operational energy under material degradation and climate uncertainty: A sensitivity analysis

Building energy prediction models expedite performance assessment and assist in decision making, from early-stage design to retrofit planning at single- or multi-building scales. However, the number of parameters involved in the energy performance evaluation often impede the prediction process requiring the assimilation of high-dimensional, uncertain input. This is compounded further at multi-building scale e.g. urban energy modelling, due to the increased complexity of evaluating diverse building geometries. While single-building sensitivity and uncertainty analysis is well-established for identifying the most influential input parameters and evaluate the uncertainty effects on energy demand, these are hard to generalize at multi-building scale which remains relatively unexplored. The present study advances existing research by applying a variance-based sensitivity analysis to assess the impact of varying (i) building façade layout, (ii) envelope thermal properties, (iii) envelope air tightness and (iv) building occupancy. The analysis is conducted for multiple buildings under two future climate variations, while also considering the degradation of material thermal properties. The latter is derived from known deterioration models for single-building uncertainty propagation, relying on experimental and simulated data. The approach is applied to a temperate oceanic climate with particular focus on the Dutch building stock, including a sample of buildings with diverse geometric characteristics in Rotterdam. First-order Sobol indices are computed to evaluate the impact with respect to the heating, cooling and total energy demand. Our findings indicate that infiltration is the most influential factor for heating energy demand, whereas cooling is mostly affected by the envelope thermal properties and, particularly, window solar heat gain coefficient. Common patterns regarding the impact of insulation across different envelope components can be identified among buildings with similar orientation and compactness ratio indicating the importance of considering these geometric properties in retrofit decision-making workflows.