Impacts of apartment building energy renovation policies on Finnish combined heat and power production

The European work against climate change requires decreasing the carbon emissions of the energy system. Apartment buildings consume a considerable amount of energy, especially for heating. Typically, research on energy renovation measures to decrease this consumption use current (or similar) energy system data for emission estimates. This approach undervalues the dynamic nature of energy production technologies, given the lifetime of the renovation investments. Especially in Finland, the dynamic is strong: District heating (DH) is common, and largely supplied by combined heat and power. Due to this electricity-DH connection, electricity and DH consumption profiles of buildings have a large potential to affect the technologies used for energy production, as well as the emissions released. In this paper, we show that the pathway taken in energy renovations of Finnish apartment buildings until 2050 will have an impact on the energy system of that time, as visioned in our scenario.