GUIDEBOOK · CEA v4.0
Life Cycle Analysis
Life Cycle Analysis
Life cycle analysis (LCA) features assess the environmental impacts and costs of building energy systems throughout their lifecycle. CEA-4 uses a what-if analysis framework: you define supply configurations for buildings and district plants, then analyse final energy, emissions, costs, and heat rejection for each scenario.
What-If Analysis Concept
A what-if scenario represents one possible supply system configuration for your district. Each scenario defines:
- Which energy carrier each building uses for each service (heating, cooling, DHW, electricity)
- Which conversion technology each building uses (boiler, heat pump, chiller, etc.)
- Whether buildings connect to a district heating (DH) or district cooling (DC) network
- What plant technology serves the district network
You can create multiple what-if scenarios to compare alternatives (e.g. “all gas boilers” vs “heat pumps with DH”).
Dependency Chain
Energy Demand (Part 2)
|
v
Final Energy (per what-if scenario)
|
+--> LCA Emissions (lifecycle + operational)
+--> System Costs (CAPEX + OPEX)
+--> Heat Rejection (waste heat to environment)Final Energy must run first for each what-if scenario. It produces configuration.json which stores the supply configuration, and per-building/plant hourly energy files. The other three features read from these outputs.
Output Location
All what-if results are stored under:
{scenario}/outputs/data/analysis/{what-if-name}/
├── final-energy/
├── emissions/
├── costs/
└── heat/Features
| Feature | Page | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Final Energy | 06-1-final-energy.md | Energy carriers and quantities consumed by buildings and plants |
| Emissions | 06-2-emissions.md | Lifecycle and operational greenhouse gas emissions |
| System Costs | 06-3-system-costs.md | CAPEX, OPEX, and total annualised costs |
| Heat Rejection | 06-4-heat-rejection.md | Waste heat rejected to the environment |
Common Settings
Include Plants/Buildings Filter
All four features and their plots share a filter to control whether buildings, plants, or both appear in results:
- Buildings: Individual building-scale systems
- Plants: District-scale plants (DH/DC network plants)
This is configured via the plots-include-plants-buildings parameter section.
Building Filter
Standard building filters apply to all features:
- Filter by building name
- Filter by construction year range
- Filter by construction type
- Filter by use type
Plant entities are never filtered by the building name list.
Related Features
- Energy Demand Forecasting - Prerequisite for all LCA features
- Thermal Network - Required for district-connected scenarios
- Renewable Energy Assessment - Solar potential affects embodied emissions
- Visualisation - Additional plotting tools
- Export Results to CSV - Batch export of what-if results
← Back: Thermal Network | Back to Index | Next: Final Energy →
Source: view raw on GitHub ↗