Energy Rating Software
Introduction
The environmental assessment of buildings with a life cycle approach still seems new for most professionals involved in the construction sector. However, due to new regulations and environmental quality requirements of the European market, LCA is becoming more present in their activities. Evidence of this is the intense normative work on the assessment of the sustainability of buildings carried out by the European Committee for Standardization and specifically, the technical committee TC/350 [1]. The European market has different LCA
tools for modelling and impact calculation (Simapro [2], Gabi [3], Umberto [4], EcoQuantum [5], etc). However, these tools require expert knowledge in building definition and assessment with LCA perspective and do not have specific national environmental databases for construction products.
Along with the problem of the complexity of this type of tools, one of the main reasons for the development of this software is focused on providing a solution to the fact that the current Spanish energy certification tool, Calener [6], only quantifies the environmental impacts associated with the use stage of the building. When full life cycle impacts of a building need to be assessed, a second and completely independent study is required which increases efforts and costs.
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