A quantitative comparison on the use of thermal insulation materials in three European countries through the TEnSE approach: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Europe has about 75 % of energy inefficient buildings and 8 % of population in energy poverty with difficulties of affording energy bills for keeping adequate levels of warmth, cooling, lighting, and energy use for household appliances in building stock. The implementation of thermal insulation in existing buildings would allow to address both energy efficiency and energy poverty and to align with the Net Zero Emission Scenario. This research proposes an inverse decision-making approach to investigate on the reasons behind the use of some thermal insulation materials in three countries within the European Economic Area (Italy, Norway, and Portugal), differing in terms of Energy Poverty as well as environmental and legislative contexts. For this reason, four macro-domains objectives, framed in Technical (T), Environmental (En), Safety (S) and Economic (E) topics, named as TEnSE, were considered. Ten thermal insulation materials commonly used in these countries were compared to understand which of four perspectives affects their choices in current times among several stakeholders. As none of the selected materials has obtained the highest score among stakeholders and their use is presumably due to buildability, challenges and opportunities in their future implementation are discussed considering different climate ‘what-if’ scenarios.