IES and Dublin City
Council are partnering on a whole-life carbon digital twin
project to optimize the renovation of social housing, writes a
statement. To facilitate the project, IES
developed digital twin modelling of three 1960s residential blocks
in the Irish capital. Taking into account both embodied (emissions
associated with construction and materials) and operational carbon,
it assessed the efficiency of four renovation strategies over three
time periods to align with the council’s climate targets.
IES used its core Virtual Environment (VE) software to calculate
the embodied carbon associated with each of the four strategies –
shallow retrofit, medium retrofit, deep retrofit or reduce to shell
and rebuild. “Once this was added to the operational emissions, and
estimated at different life periods (20, 40 and 60 years), Strategy
3 outperformed Strategy 4 due to the high embodied carbon
associated with a full renovation,” explains IES.
Sabrina Dekker, Climate Change Co-ordinator, Dublin City Council,
said in the statement: “IES’s digital twin technology has enabled
us to confirm the importance of retrofitting to reduce our
emissions and we hope that the results can be utilised to inform
future projects.”
The project was funded by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform’s Public Sector Innovation Fund. The full results are included in the Dublin City Council Climate Resilient Housing Report. It highlights that each residential block can achieve around an 85 per cent reduction in cumulative emissions by carrying out a deep retrofit over a 60-year life period. em
