Gas vs electric: Heating system fuel source implications on low-energy single-family dwelling sustainability performance.

With an increasing interest in sustainable infrastructure, focus has been placed on cost-effective low-energy residential buildings. However, limited research has been completed on the impact of heating fuel selection on sustainability performance when evaluating low-energy building design goals. Heating fuel type is an important factor because space and water heating accounts for a significant fraction of home energy consumption.

An Exploration of the Relationship between Improvements in Energy Efficiency and Life-Cycle Energy and Carbon Emissions using the BIRDS Low-Energy Residential Database.

To conduct a more complete analysis of low-energy and net-zero energy buildings that considers both the operating and embodied energy/emissions, members of the building community look to life-cycle assessment (LCA) methods. This paper examines differences in the relative impacts of cost-optimal energy efficiency measure combinations depicting residential buildings up to and beyond net-zero energy consumption on operating and embodied flows using data from the Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) Low-Energy Residential Database. Results indicate that net-zero performance leads to a large increase in embodied flows (over 40%) that offsets some of the reductions in operational flows, but overall life-cycle flows are still reduced by over 60% relative to the state energy code.