How optimal building decarbonization pathways differ when considering energy burden and job creation

Building decarbonization, the aim to make buildings more energy efficient and switch to low-carbon fuels, is necessary to achieve climate change goals. Traditional approaches to create building decarbonization pathways often only examine cost and GHG emissions to determine viable retrofit solutions. If considered, impacts of broader social metrics of interest to tenants and elected officials are typically considered in subsequent analyses, hiding the explicit tradeoffs that occur across these, in some cases, competing goals.

This work uses multi-objective optimization to explicitly explore how optimal retrofit scenarios change when considering objectives beyond cost and greenhouse gas emissions. The results of three optimizations with differing objectives are compared: a traditional techno-economic analysis, a techno-economic analysis extended to include estimates of energy burden, and a techno-economic analysis extended to include metrics for job creation.

Analyzing eight buildings in West Harlem, NYC, with passive and active upgrades, the traditional techno-economic optimization prioritized low efficiency and low cost HVAC electrification, whereas the optimization considering energy burden considered measures to improve envelope and highly efficient HVAC electrification options in the most energy burdened buildings. The results show that incorporating these objectives during the optimization process leads to vastly different retrofit solutions meaning these metrics should be considered explicitly in decision-making tools.