• Energy Research

Global energy consumption has risen enormously over the past century due to population growth and increasing energy use per person. Industrial production consumes a significant portion of global energy resources. Thus, industrial sector’s investment in energy efficiency is critical to a sustainable future. For most global enterprises the consumption of energy and natural resources represents a major overhead and developing sustainable energy policies can represent a significant competitive advantage due to the growing price of energy and volatility of supply. This symbiotic relationship can lead to the mutual benefits of increasing industrial efficiency whilst allowing the transition to a sustainable renewables-based energy future and needs to be significantly harnessed. This paper describes a decision support framework to help industrial organisations make positive investment decisions on energy performance improvement projects.

The European Union (EU) has developed policies aimed at accelerating the retrofit of existing buildings, with the vision of a decarbonised building stock by 2050. Retrofitting of existing buildings offers significant opportunities to reduce global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Although there is a wide range of government incentives available, retrofits only affect 0.5–1% of the building stock per year. Thus, this research conducted a literature review in order to identify the barriers preventing retrofitting of existing buildings. These barriers include low financial availability, user awareness, uncertainty in regulatory frameworks and fragmentation of the supply chain. The research presented here overcomes these retrofit barriers by developing a novel step-by-step guideline for building retrofit. The proposed workflow combines the benefits of Building Information Modelling (BIM) with the Business Process Modelling (BPM) technique. BIM is used for its capacity to create and manage information along the full life-cycle of a building. While BPM allows to optimise the retrofit workflow, by providing all relevant stakeholders with (i) the instruments to better understand their roles and responsibilities in the retrofit process, (ii) the technological framework and data needed to efficiently implement BIM within the project. This novel BIM- BPM workflow was demonstrated on a residential pilot building located in Inis Mór, Ireland.