Energetic Savings Potential and Air Polluants reduction in the residential sector. The case of the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires

The conservation policies and Rational Use of Energy (RUE) developed until the present, had their origin in the search of a smaller energetic consumption in order to reduce economic costs in a growing prices market of the fuels. Consequently methodologies were developed for the energy saving dimensionment for the residential sector with energetic supply nets. Its implementation is based on the typological-buildings analysis of the housings park, supported by a plan of audit - energetic diagnosis, and the validation by comparison between the audited consumptions and the one registered by the companies services lenders. From the typological analysis of representative housings and from the global and detailed energetic audits on a basic sample of 2000 households of the area, the segregated information of each energetic vector is obtained (electricity and natural gas) and of the way of use (heating, boiling, hot water, lighting and others). The integration of representative typologies, consumption, intervention and validation measures, allows to quantify the energy potential saving of the residential sector. What concerns to the environmental effects that those consumption were generating - expressed to local scale by the gases emission and to regional scale by the need of widening energy production - were not taken into account. This work advances on these topics quantifying the contribution of the energetic consumption of the residential sector of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires to the atmospherical pollution, evaluating its decrease upon adopting measures of RUE in the considerated sector.