Urban energy lifecycle: an analytical framework to evaluate the embodied energy use of urban developments

Given the dominating impact of the built environment on global carbon emissions, reducing operational energy use in buildings has long been considered a key strategy towards more sustainable urban development. In contrast, building energy use related to material production, construction, and demolition has been considered to be significantly less important. However, given the proliferation of low and even net zero energy buildings, more holistic life cycle assessment (LCA) of buildings becomes necessary. This paper hence proposes an analytical framework and a new CAD tool for Rhino3d to estimate the cumulative embodied energy content of an urban design proposal or retrofit scenario based on a simple design 3D massing model combined with an interactive online material database. The tool can be linked with traditional, EnergyPlus based operational energy assessments in order to predict the overall environmental impact of a proposed urban design.