Energy modelling of city housing stock and its temporal evolution

With very low rates of replacement of the existing somewhat dated housing stock a key challenge for nations to meet their emissions reduction targets during the coming years will be to improve the energy performance of existing buildings within their cities. In this paper we describe the preliminary form of a system dynamics model of the housing stock of the city of Basel in Switzerland and investigate how this may evolve up to the year 2050. In particular we model the renovation process of the stock, test the key parameters influencing this process (e.g. renovation cycle and future population change) and analyse the resulting energy performance of the stock (measured by energy consumption for space heating and domestic hot water as well as greenhouse gas emissions). Potential future technological improvements to energy performace standards and to the embodied energy associated with renovation activity are also taken into account. We close the paper by presenting the tested scenarios and discussing the results from applications of the model to the city of Basel.