Chastas Panagiotis, Theodosiu Theodoros, Bikas Dimitrios

This literature review addresses the Life Cycle Energy Analysis (LCEA) of residential buildings. As the fluctuation in the choice of functional units, boundaries of the system, life cycle inventory (LCI) methods, metrics and impact indicators complicated the potential comparability, the guidelines of Product Category Rule (PCR) 2014:02 for buildings were applied for the normalization procedure. Even though PCR provided a clear statement of the boundaries and a complete presentation of the results, uncertainty deriving from the LCI methods and the omissions in the system boundaries indicates that further standardization is needed. The sample consisted of 90 LCEA case studies of conventional, passive, low energy and nearly zero energy residential buildings (nZEB).