The building sector is responsible for 28% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, two thirds of which relate exclusively to indirect emissions (heating, lighting, ventilation etc.).
While the potential for energy retrofitting is currently under-exploited, it is a crucial step towards reducing indirect GHG emissions.
So far, energy renovation has been slow because there is a lack of both real government action and support from the real estate sector.
We seem to be moving in the right direction, but it is not yet possible to meet long-term objectives: energy retrofitting must therefore become a new social norm.
PhD student at Centre de Recherche en Gestion (i3-CRG*) at École Polytechnique (IP Paris)
Key takeaways
AI is being used in several areas of renovation: the most promising of which today are advances are in design, to make automated plans.
Decision-makers are faced with new variables such as climate resilience, which have no obvious technical solutions.
At early stages of the discussion, AI can automatically generate optimised representations, which save time for decision-makers.
Artificial neural networks can be modelled by putting them in problematic situations to develop better strategies to counter them: one will model the urban ecosystem, for example, and the other will play the role of the difficulty (cold, heat, flood).
In order to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by the manufacture of construction materials, opting for biosourced materials (derived from animal or plant biomass) seems to be a good alternative.
Unlike conventional materials, biobased materials not only avoid depleting soil carbon but also store atmospheric CO2 for decades.
Biobased materials offer many opportunities, both in terms of overall comfort and carbon footprint, provided that the biomass extracted is offset by the production.
However, biobased materials currently account for only 12% of materials used in the building industry: the arrival of new regulations could change this.
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