Evaluation of the environmental benefits of energy management systems based on a realistic classification of French households - application to heating management systems

The development of home automation systems requires more environmental assessments to be consistent with policies aiming at reducing domestic energy consumption. This work makes an original contribution to the literature by presenting a methodology for finding an environmentally optimal hardware selection strategy. It is applied to case studies that are representative of household and housing situations in France. Assessing the environmental benefits of energy management systems raises two major issues: the estimation of the environmental impacts of the systems and the calculation of the heating energy consumption. In this work we investigate the environmental impacts in terms of greenhouse gas emissions (in kgCO2,eq) and primary energy consumption (in kWhpe). We propose to quantify the environmental benefits of such systems by balancing the life cycle impacts of the added control system against the associated reduction in heating requirement. The simulation of the heating requirement is performed using the dynamic thermal simulation software STD-COMFIE. We use household, housing and behavioural archetypes from the literature, which allows us to study fictitious households representative of segments of French households. The methodology for calculating environmental benefits is applied to three case studies with four different heating control systems. This paper concludes that there is a system minimising the impacts depending on the case study and the observed impact. All in all, a more complex management system systematically improves thermal outcomes but does not necessarily reduce the environmental impacts.