A tool for Danish buildings energy retrofit design and evaluation using dynamic energy simulations

In general, static tools and simplified assessment approaches are still dominating the Danish building energy retrofit market. These static tools are generally associated with a large number of assumptions and tend to neglect the overall building dynamics. This leads to major uncertainties and substantial gaps between the predicted performance, promised before retrofitting, and the real building performance after carrying out the retrofit project. To overcome these challenges, this work presents the design, development and demonstration of DanRETRO, a tool for Danish buildings energy retrofit design and evaluation. The tool uses a large database of dynamic performance simulations employing EnergyPlus, for different building types, ages and sizes, allowing a preliminary assessment of the technical, economic and environmental impacts of various retrofit measures. In this regard, the tool provides a large selection of retrofit techniques and measures along with retrofit packages. DanRETRO is intended to be a comprehensive building energy retrofit assessment tool, but at the same time being simple to use with minimal inputs. The demonstration of the tool in an office building, a single-family house and an apartment in Denmark is presented and assessed. DanRETRO evaluation results are aimed to serve as a basis to aid energy retrofit projects decision-making.