Energy Costs of Energy Savings in Buildings: A Review

It is often claimed that the cheapest energy is the one you do not need to produce. Nevertheless, this claim could somehow be unsubstantiated. In this article, the authors try to shed some light on this issue by using the concept of energy return on investment (<em>EROI</em>) as a yardstick. This choice brings semantic issues because in this paper the <em>EROI</em> is used in a different context than that of energy production. Indeed, while watts and negawatts share the same physical unit, they are not the same object, which brings some ambiguities in the interpretation of <em>EROI</em>. These are cleared by a refined definition of <em>EROI</em> and an adapted nomenclature. This review studies the research in the energy efficiency of building operation, which is one of the most investigated topics in energy efficiency. This study focuses on the impact of insulation and high efficiency windows as means to exemplify the concepts that are introduced. These results were normalized for climate, life time of the building, and construction material. In many cases, energy efficiency measures imply a very high <em>EROI</em>. Nevertheless, in some circumstances, this is not the case and it might be more profitable to produce the required energy than to try to save it.